When Your Judgment (Mis)Matches Mine: How One’s Self and Others’ Metacognitive Judgments Impact Our Perception of Others

The current study explored whether other people’s judgments about one’s own performance affect one’s perception of them. In two experiments, participants were provided with scenarios of high (e.g., 90%) or low (e.g., 70%) estimations of exam performance from “others” and “themselves”, as compared to a fixed, benchmark performance score (e.g., 80%). Accordingly, there were four conditions varying by other- and self-estimations: high–high, high–low, low–high, and low–low. Participants were asked to choose the one, given a series of all possible pairs of two peers, who they would get along with better; and who they thought noticed/observed them better. Results showed that participants judged that they would get along with the other who overestimated their performance, suggesting that individuals exhibit a preference for others who demonstrate overconfidence in their abilities. However, they ranked the other with matching (to their own) estimations—either overconfident or underconfident—as having noticed/observed them better. These patterns were consistently found in Likert-scale responses. The results indicate that metacognitive judgments need not necessarily be matching when assessing the performance of another to form relationships, and that both the context and the relation between one’s self and other’s judgments play a large role in social perception.