When responding to knowledge questions, people monitor their confidence in the knowledge they retrieve from memory and strategically regulate their responses so as to provide answers that are both correct and informative. The current study investigated the association between subjective confidence and the use of two response strategies: seeking help and withholding answers by responding “I don’t know”. Seeking help has been extensively studied as a resource management strategy in self-regulated learning, but has been largely neglected in metacognition research. In contrast, withholding answers has received less attention in educational studies than in metacognition research. Across three experiments, we compared the relationship between subjective confidence and strategy use in conditions where participants could choose between submitting answers and seeking help, between submitting and withholding answers, or between submitting answers, seeking help, and withholding answers. Results consistently showed that the association between confidence and help seeking was weaker than that between confidence and withholding answers. This difference was found for participants from two different populations, remained when participants received monetary incentives for accurate answers, and replicated across two forms of help. Our findings suggest that seeking help is guided by a wider variety of considerations than withholding answers, with some considerations going beyond improving the immediate accuracy of one’s answers. We discuss implications for research on metacognition and regarding question answering in educational and other contexts.

在回答知识问题时，人们会监控自己对从记忆中获取的知识的信心，并从战略上规范他们的回答，以提供正确且有益的答案。当前的研究调查了主观信心与使用两种应对策略之间的关联：寻求帮助和通过回答“我不知道”来隐瞒答案。寻求帮助已被广泛研究为自我调节学习中的资源管理策略，但在元认知研究中却被很大程度上忽略了。相反，隐性答案在教育研究中受到的关注少于在元认知研究中。在三个实验中，在参与者可以选择提交答案和寻求帮助，提交和保留答案之间，或提交答案，寻求帮助和保留答案之间进行选择的条件下，我们比较了主观信心和策略使用之间的关系。结果一致表明，信心和寻求帮助之间的关联性比信心和隐瞒答案之间的关联性弱。对于来自两个不同人群的参与者，发现了这种差异，当参与者获得金钱奖励以获取准确答案时，这种差异仍然存在，并且可以在两种形式的帮助中复制。我们的研究结果表明，寻求帮助的指导原则比隐瞒答案的指导原则更广泛，其中一些考虑因素不仅可以提高答案的即时准确性。