Isolating cultural contributions to metacognition

Some aspects of human metacognition, such as the ability to consciously evaluate our beliefs and decisions, are thought to be culturally acquired. However, direct evidence for this claim is lacking. As an initial step in answering this question, here we examine differences in metacognitive performance between populations matched for occupation (students), income, demographics and general intelligence, but drawn from two distinct cultural milieus (Beijing, China and London, UK). We show that Chinese participants have heightened metacognitive evaluation of perceptual decision-making task performance in comparison with UK participants. These differences manifested in boosts to post-decisional processing following error trials, despite an absence of differences in first-order performance. In a second experiment, we replicate these findings in a new task that replaced post-decision evidence with equivalent social advice. Together, our results are consistent with a proposal that metacognitive capacity is shaped via socio-cultural interactions.