UC Berkeley

Humans possess a metacognitive sense of certainty which, for better or worse, influences behavior. This sense of certainty is often misleading and can leave us vulnerable to believing false information. In this dissertation, I study how humans form their sense of certainty and the types of false beliefs which we can be at times, highly certain of. This work spans across multiple domains, including concept learning, word-meaning, pseudoscience, and people’s metacognitive beliefs. Across seven experiments, I present empirical evidence that learners use heuristics over idealized model-based features when forming their sense of certainty, and that this leaves us prone to errors which can result in the adoption of misinformed beliefs as drastic as the belief that the Earth is flat.