Do you believe in 'blind insight'?

Even before realising the consequences of a bad decision, people know that the decision they took was wrong after all, thanks to what can be called a "blind insight", a study contends.

The findings suggest that people must have had some unconscious insight into their decision making, even though they failed to use the knowledge in making their original decision, a phenomenon the researchers call "blind insight".

"The existence of blind insight tells us that our knowledge of the likely accuracy of our decisions - our metacognition - does not always derive directly from the same information used to make those decisions," said researcher Ryan Scott from University of Sussex in Britain.

The researchers looked at data from 450 student volunteers, aged 18 to 40.

The researchers found that, despite their overall chance-level performance, inaccurate decision makers made reliable confidence judgments about their decisions.

In fact, the reliability of their confidence judgments did not differ from the reliability of confidence judgments made by accurate decision makers.

In other words, they knew when they were wrong, despite being unable to make accurate judgments.

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.