How to guess correctly on a multiple choice question

Often, you’ll hear people say that you should “trust your instincts” when making decisions. But are first instincts always the best?

Psychological research has shown many times that no, they are often no better— and in worse cases worse —than a revision or change. Despite enormous popular belief that first instincts are special, dozens of experiments have found that they are not.


While that may be a useful fact to bring up in an academic discussion, anyone who has ever made a decision in real life will undoubtedly reply: But I remember times when I made a correct choice, then changed my mind and was wrong.


This happens for two reasons:

First, humans naturally have something called an endowment bias, where we feel strongly attached to things we already have (our first instinct, in this case).

We don’t want to give it up, and we feel especially bad when we give it up and it turns out later to be correct. We remember these instances vividly and thus they seem to be very common, even though all research shows that they are less common.
The second reason is more obvious: sometimes first instincts actually are correct. The problem is figuring out when to trust yourself and when to change course.

The solution may lie within the realm of “metacognition,” the ability to “think about thinking” and use those thoughts to monitor and control behavior.


Experimental Verification

Students were asked to track their confidence on each response to a real multiple choice psychology exam, marking it either a “guess” or “known” to indicate how sure they were about their original answer. They also marked whether or not they revised that original response.

More often than not, the students’ revisions—changes from a first instinct to a new choice—resulted in a correct answer. And on questions that caused the most uncertainty, sticking with an initial response was a bad idea: they were wrong more than half the time.

Their “metacognition,” in the form of confidence ratings for each question, was an excellent predictor of whether they made the correct decision and thus whether or not they should change their response. In other words, they were able to tell, in the moment, whether or not they would get the question correct. And because they wrote down those accurate judgments, they could use them later when deciding to change their answer or not.

In a second experiment, the alternative of sticking with original answers was studied.
Again using metacognitive confidence ratings, this time on a one-to-five scale, students were able to identify the questions that they were mostly likely to get correct or incorrect.

Using those ratings as a guide, it was discovered that when they chose to stick with an original instinct they were correct more often than not. Thus, both revisions and first instincts were correct most of the time.


Conclusion

Thus, the key to knowing when to stick with your first instinct and when to change your mind is to track feelings of confidence during the moment you make the decision. During college exams, both revising and sticking with original answers had the potential to result in more correct than incorrect answers.

Only the self-tracking of confidence levels predicted when each was more appropriate. By using that simple form of metacognition, students could better identify which questions to revise and which were better left alone.

Excerpted from QUARTZ