Overview
- Participants who reported high anxiety became less confident the longer they reflected, a pattern consistent with negative rumination.
- Women began less confident than men but gained confidence with more time, narrowing the gender gap in reported certainty.
- The findings come from pooled data across two perceptual decision experiments that recorded confidence ratings and the time taken to report them.
- A dynamic computational model captured the diverging time courses, supporting negative self-evaluations in anxiety versus different certainty thresholds in women.
- The peer-reviewed study, published in Psychological Medicine, suggests targeted interventions such as interrupting rumination for anxious individuals and encouraging slower, reflective decision-making to address gender-related confidence gaps.