Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We are often confronted with new causal information aboutthe world, such as what causes a disease. What we think weknow may influence if and how we choose to use this new in-formation. Yet as prior work has shown, we are not alwayssuccessful at evaluating our own knowledge. We explored howhelping people better understand what they know about a do-main can influence their ability to use new causal informationin a decision-making context. Participants self-assessed theirknowledge (Experiment 1) or completed an objective assess-ment of their knowledge (Experiment 2) of diabetes, beforemaking diabetes-related decisions, either with or without newcausal information. Without a knowledge assessment, partic-ipants were less accurate with new causal information com-pared to without such information, replicating previous work.However, reassessing their knowledge increased participants’decision-making accuracy with causal information. We dis-cuss why helping people realize the limits of their causal un-derstanding may make them better supplement it with new in-formation.