Are You As Emotionally Intelligent As You Think You Are? Confidence, but Not Metacognition, Moderates the Alignment Between Self-Rated and Ability Emotional Intelligence

Self-report and ability-based measures of emotional intelligence (EI) are assumed to assess the same construct, yet they typically weakly converge. One possibility is that accurate self-reports depend on introspective abilities, including metacognitive monitoring, whereas inflated self-views may reflect generalised confidence. We tested whether metacognition and confidence explain discrepancies between perceived and demonstrated EI. Undergraduate participants (N =195) completed a perceptual decision-making task yielding indices of metacognition and confidence, alongside matched self-report and performance-based measures of emotional understanding and management. Replicating prior work, self-report and ability EI were weakly related. In the emotional management domain, the association was negative, such that participants with higher self-ratings tended to perform worse. Contrary to predictions, metacognition was unrelated to either self-report or ability EI and did not moderate their correspondence. Confidence, however, showed a distinct pattern: higher confidence was associated with higher self-rated emotional management, lower performance on both ability tasks, and larger self-report/ability EI discrepancies. Confidence also weakened the relation between self-rated and ability emotional management, indicating poorer calibration among more confident individuals. These findings suggest that confidence, not metacognition, may drive the divergence between self-perceived and actual EI, and that self-report EI may partly capture certainty in ability rather than ability itself.