COnfident DEcisions

Virtually every decision people make comes with a sense of confidence – a subjective estimate of decision quality. The human capacity for confidence has tremendous social, clinical, and industrial impact. For example, children who can correctly judge their own level of confidence perform better academically. In the elderly, confidence declines faster than other cognitive functions. Clinically, confidence plays a key role in our understanding of various brain-related disorders, including dementia, anxiety, addiction, and depression. In industry, confidence helps people trust algorithms and automated systems, and creates more natural interactions with smartphones and self-driving cars. While the past decade has seen major advances in our scientific understanding of decision confidence, its mechanisms remain poorly understood. This lack of understanding significantly hampers the translation to real-world applications, such as educational programmes and clinical interventions. A major challenge for the immediate future is to fill this gap, by expanding fundamental knowledge on decision confidence and explicitly bridging to technologies, interventions, and clinical practice. CODE aims to address this need. We are an international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral training network that spans fundamental and applied confidence-based research, and bridges between academia, industry, education, and the clinic. By reaching across domains that usually work in silos, CODE will provide critical new insights into decision confidence, and pave the way for important future confidence-based applications. We will train doctoral students to become the interdisciplinary decision confidence experts of the future, who can flexibly apply their knowledge and skills in a wide variety of domains and sectors, and are exceptionally well prepared for successful careers in either academia or industry.