Comparing self- and hetero-metacognition in the absence of verbal communication

The ability to infer how confident other people are in their decisions is crucial for regulating social interactions. In many cooperative situations, verbal communication enables one to communicate one's confidence and to appraise that of others. However, in many circumstances, people either cannot explicitly communicate their confidence level (e.g., in an emergency situation) or may be intentionally deceitful (e.g., when playing poker). It is currently unclear whether one can read others’ confidence in the absence of verbal communication, and whether one can infer it as accurately as for one’s own confidence. To explore these questions, we used an auditory task in which participants either had to guess the confidence of someone else performing the task or to judge their own confidence, in different conditions (i.e., while performing the task themselves or while watching themselves perform the task on a pre-recorded video). Results demonstrate that people can read the confidence someone else has in their decision as accurately as they evaluate their own uncertainty in their decision. Crucially, we show that hetero-metacognition is a flexible mechanism that relies on different cues according to the context. Our results support the idea that metacognition leverages the same inference mechanisms as those involved in theory of mind.