Reducing Blind Spots? Performance Feedback Reduces Relative Confidence but Does Not Improve Subsequent News Discernment

The public’s ability to discern the veracity of news has attracted substantial interest. Lack of metacognitive awareness (i.e., knowing one’s skill level) is one barrier to improving this skill set. Performance feedback could reduce overconfidence and spur differential responding, or adopting a new evaluation strategy, by providing such information. We randomized the provision of feedback (with the feedback message determined by the respondent’s actual performance in a preliminary headline evaluation task) to test this proposition (N = 1,846). We found that feedback reduced relative confidence – to a similar extent for both below and above average performers. However, this reduced relative confidence did not translate into improved performance on a subsequent discernment task. Notably, when re-contacted 1 week later (N = 668), the main effect of reduced relative confidence persisted. These results suggest that although relative performance feedback may target self-assessments, more constructive feedback may be required to improve discernment performance.