Another long journey comes to a successful end with this publication!
Congratulations to Alexander Schröder for this great collaborative effort, which brings together Susanne Diekelmann (as part of the DFG-funded Research Group “Information abstraction during sleep”), Christoph Korn (University of Heidelberg; expert in computational modeling and belief updating), Lei Zhang (our group’s teacher and advisor on computational modeling methods & collaborator from Birmingham University) and many highly supportive people from our lab.
Quick summary of what this paper is all about:
In the past, our group was examining how people form ability self-beliefs based on performance feedback. Now, in this new paper, we ask how such self-beliefs, once successfully established, can be revised? This question of how beliefs, especially self-beliefs, where people commonly have high confidence in, are open to change has significant implications for our social, political, and personal lives.
Here we show, that once beliefs were formed in an experimental setting (more or less within 20min), it was pretty difficult to revise them with contradictory feedback 12h later and the more confident people were in their established beliefs the less they were open for change.
Abstract
Human self-beliefs hinge on social feedback, but their formation and revision are not solely based on new information. Biases during learning, such as confirming initial expectations, can lead to inaccurate beliefs. This study uses computational modeling to explore how initial expectations about one’s own and others’ abilities and confidence in these beliefs affect processes of belief formation and belief revision in novel behavioral domains. In the first session, participants formed performance beliefs through trial-by-trial feedback. In the second session, feedback contingencies were reversed to promote a revision of beliefs. Results showed that people form and revise beliefs in a confirmatory manner, with lower initial expectations being linked to more negatively biased belief formation and revision, while growing confidence strengthened these beliefs over time. Once formed, these beliefs proved resistant to change even when faced with contradictory feedback. The findings suggest that newly formed beliefs become entrenched and resistant to new, contradictory information in a short period of time. Understanding how self-beliefs are formed, the role that confidence plays in this process, and why established beliefs are difficult to revise can inform the development of interventions aimed at promoting more adaptive learning in educational, clinical, and social contexts.
Link to article here.
Schröder, A., Czekalla, N., Mayer, A. V., Zhang, L., Stolz, D. S., Korn, C. W., Diekelmann, S., Luebber, F., Paulus, F. M., Müller-Pinzler, L., & Krach, S. (2025). Initial Expectations and Confidence Affect the Formation of Novel Self-Beliefs and Their Revision. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 9, 1576–1596. https://doi.org /10.1162/OPMI.a.36