"This paper compared decision-making mechanisms between action and state-oriented people using paradigms capable of dissociating between decision-making mechanisms and confidence processing. Our results suggest that the differences between groups arise not due to how evidence is obtained or strategic adjustments but due to how it is interpreted by a higher-level process relating evidence to subjective confidence...Most human goals involve a sequence of choices and actions...At each point in this multi-stage process, our confidence can influence how likely we will progress. Since completing all the intermediate steps is necessary to succeed, low confidence bias has many opportunities to seed doubt and lead to giving up...All else being equal, this confidence gap might be the reason why some people succeed where others cannot" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0268501#sec046
The text above was taken from the conclusions of a recent paper published in PlosOne titled "Are you confident enough to act? Individual differences in action control are associated with post-decisional metacognitive bias".
I just hope that in the future the authors try to find out what percentage of confident people are in fact psychopaths, just because (unlike empathetic people) psychopaths are very good at making hard decisions even when those decisions have extremely negative consequences for other people. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/18/why-psychopaths-are-so-good-at-getting-ahead.html
PS - In previous posts I have argued more than once that at least doctors (and nurses) should undergo a psychopathy screening test before being hired. And it would also make sense that at least those professionals who routinely make decisions that affect many people should also be tested.
