Abstract:
Search is an important part of our lives; We search for food to eat and what job to accept. How and when do we decide when to terminate our searches? This question was studied in sequential search tasks in the behavioral economics literature. The robust finding is that people terminate their search too early compared to the optimum. In another literature, meta-cognition, confidence judgments are shown to guide the termination of mental searches. The current work is aimed to combine both behavioral economics and metacognition research fields to investigate the relationship between external search, in a repeated search task, and internal confidence judgments. By manipulating the environments’ variance and examining repeated searches within the same environment, we aimed to alter search behavior and by that, to shed light on its relationship with confidence judgments. The results of two experiments demonstrate that higher variance leads to changes in search but not in confidence. Since confidence is equivalent, this may imply it serves as a stopping rule for search termination. We also found that experience correlates with higher levels of confidence, better accuracy, and improved performance, but it does not affect search. Thus, people increased their target level of confidence, became more accurate and performed better overtime. Furthermore, an overall positive relationship between search and confidence was found. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.
