External incentives change the relation between confidence and epistemic curiosity

Rational vigilance of intentions and incentives guides learning from advice

The Emergence of Causal Curiosity from Prior Causal Belief Networks

Causal curiosity is foundational to human cognition. It is the desire to understand why events happen, what mechanisms underlie them, and how outcomes can be explained or anticipated. It motivates exploration, sustains attention, and fuels the search for new knowledge. However, despite consensus on the importance of ca...

Curiosity at Work: A Productive Inefficiency Model

Curiosity is increasingly recognized as consequential for work outcomes including achievement and creativity. Unlike related constructs such as growth mindset and openness, curiosity involves active deviation from familiar paths, inviting workers to slow down, ask additional questions, and entertain multiple possibilit...

Sorting Fact from Fiction When Reasoning Is Motivated

We combine a simple theoretical framework with a survey experiment to investigate how individuals sort fact from fiction and update their assessments in societally important but politicized topics, such as climate change and public health. We show that cognitive ability improves news discernment and in particular, the...

Confidence and Competence in Investor Cognition: An Exploratory Analysis of the Calibration Gap and Decision Biases

This article explores how subjective confidence and objective knowledge relate to investment decision behavior. The data are the investor sub-sample of the 2024 U.S. National Financial Capability Study (N=2861). Subjective knowledge uses a seven-point self-assessment, objective knowledge a twelve-item test; they correl...

Inattention, Information Provision, and (Failures of) Revealed Preference,

Economists often estimate preferences by looking at how demand for an option changes as its attributes change or as beliefs about them change in response to information. I show in a multi-attribute induced-preference experiment that this method can be substantially biased due to differential inattention. Attention is...