There's a scene in the UK mockumentary series Cunk on Earth where the ill-informed investigative reporter Philomena Cunk is in a museum, looking at busts of Greek philosophers.
Philosophy, she explains, "is basically thinking about thinking, which sounds like a waste of time, because it is."
It’s a funny observation, but as usual, Cunk is wrong. Thinking about thinking, also referred to as metacognition, isn’t just for philosophers – and it certainly isn’t a waste of time.
A slew of recent scientific studies has found that thinking about our own thinking is, in fact, crucial for making better decisions.
According to Steve Fleming, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, metacognition “is this remarkable ability that the human mind has to think about and reflect on itself.
"We’re able to recognise our mistakes. We’re able to realise when our skills and abilities aren’t as good as they used to be. We’re able to introspect about whether our memories or decisions are appropriate or need revising.”
Although metacognition has long been a cornerstone of philosophy, it’s a relatively new concept in science.
“It was only in the late 2000s that neuroscientists started to become interested in how the brain might support metacognition and develop experiments that could probe those capacities,” says Fleming.
Bad decision makers
Scientists have long been interested in how humans make decisions, though. Behavioural economists, including Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, have shown that most of us aren’t really in the driving seat when it comes to our decision making.
We constantly succumb to a range of cognitive biases and emotions – from hunger and first impressions to habits and ‘gut feelings’.
To make better decisions, they argue, we need to engage in effortful and deliberate thinking – thinking that’s slow and analytical, rather than fast and emotional.
The problem, according to Dr Igor Grossmann, a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, is that behavioural economics experiments are often carried out in laboratories where probabilities and outcomes can be clearly defined.
Real life isn’t like that. He points to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.
Early on, governments and individuals were forced to make decisions without knowing exactly how the virus spread, how people would react to lockdowns, or how long it would take to develop vaccines.
We all make decisions under uncertainty.
After all, if you want to meet the love of your life, how do you analytically compare different qualities you’re looking for in a potential partner? Qualities like humour, kindness or looks?
How do you apply mathematical analysis to decide whether it’s a good idea to switch jobs?
“You can’t apply many game theory principles or probability theory to figure out the best decision in these situations,” says Grossmann.
Other scientists have argued that rules of thumb, shortcuts or cultural idioms can be useful instead, and should sometimes guide our decision making.
But returning to the example of choosing a romantic partner, which rule of thumb or idiom should you follow? You could go with “birds of a feather flock together.” Then again, “opposites attract” might be a better way to go.
There’s no easy answer – you need to engage in metacognition to make the best decision.
Doing so involves looking beyond your immediate thoughts and feelings at that precise moment. In other words, you need to be open to the fact that your beliefs and preferences may change over time.
What’s a good decision now may not be a good decision for your future self, explains Grossmann, who’s recently published a review in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition on how to cultivate wisdom using metacognition.
Individual differences
Metacognition is increasingly being investigated as a topic of its own, but it hasn’t always been easy. Unlike analytical thinking, it’s difficult to accurately measure people’s metacognitive abilities in the lab.
Metacognition relies on things like intellectual humility, perspective-taking and openness, among other things.
You can’t just ask people whether they’re good at it – if you have poor metacognition, you’re unlikely to know it. But scientists have come up with some ingenious tests to measure one specific aspect of metacognition in detail.
In his lab, Fleming typically gives people a perceptual task, such as determining which of two boxes on a screen has more dots in it or which direction dots on that screen are moving. What’s useful about tasks like this is that they can be carried out in a brain scanner.
“After you’ve performed the task for maybe a few minutes, we can ask you, ‘how many of those decisions do you think you got right? How do you think you rank in relation to other people doing this task?’,” says Fleming.
“We also ask people to report how confident they are after each decision they make.” And it turns out some people are better at this sort of self-assessment than others, knowing when they’re likely to be wrong or right, regardless of how well they perform on the task.
People who are good at judging their own performance have good metacognitive sensitivity, explains Fleming, which is different from their overall level of confidence, dubbed metacognitive bias.
With the help of the brain scanners, Fleming’s team has shown that people who have good metacognitive sensitivity actually have a larger volume of grey matter (the brain’s outer layer, which handles critical functions like thinking and memory) in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that supports high-level cognitive functions such as multitasking, planning and retrieving memories.
They also have more efficient white matter (a component of the central nervous system) connecting this area with others.
This is obviously a highly controlled way of measuring metacognition – a useful method for investigating its neural underpinnings. Probing metacognition in day-to-day life, however, is more complicated.
Despite this, Grossmann is pioneering some interesting techniques.
For example, it turns out you can estimate people’s level of intellectual humility – a component of metacognition that’s key to realising we’re sometimes wrong.
In a paper that’s yet to be published, Grossmann has suggested exercises such as asking people difficult questions and seeing how often they delegate them to others with superior knowledge of the topic – a sign of intellectual humility.
You can also ask participants to write about political disagreements they’ve had with other people and estimate, from their writing, the extent to which they were able to take on another person’s perspective.
Perhaps they were even willing to change their mind.
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Better decisions
Several studies have shown that engaging in metacognition can improve people’s decision making. After all, if we never realise we’re wrong, never take on another perspective, and never learn from our mistakes, it’s hard to be wise.
Benefits have been observed, for example, in education. Imagine being a student preparing for an important exam. If you don’t know that there are gaps in your knowledge, how can you fully prepare to have it tested?
Fleming and his colleagues have also probed how the perceptual tasks they’ve devised may play out in real life.
In another study, they tested how dogmatic people were in their beliefs – essentially how superior they thought their views were and how intolerant they were of opposing attitudes.
They found that the people who were the most dogmatic were the least willing to seek out extra information that could help them improve their decision making in the perceptual task.
The dogmatic people trusted their confidence more and didn’t think they needed the extra guidance, even if they did. So, metacognition may protect us against becoming too narrow-minded.
Studies have also shown that cognitive reflection (a metacognitive ability that helps us avoid accepting false beliefs that may nevertheless feel right) can help people resist falling for misinformation, echo chambers and fake news.
Another intriguing finding relates to forecasting. A study by Grossmann and his colleagues, that’s currently being peer reviewed, investigated how accurate 520 experts were in their forecasting of societal trends.
It found that intellectually humble people were more accurate in their forecasts of long-term global welfare trends, such as armed conflict or carbon dioxide concentrations. In fact, this mattered more than their level of intelligence.
Grossmann thinks this is because they monitored changes over time and updated their forecasts more frequently – something we could all benefit from doing.
Another study saw Grossmann and his colleagues ask people to keep a daily diary for a month. Some were asked to write in the first person, others were asked to write in the third person.
The scientists assumed that the latter would encourage distancing, reflection and ultimately metacognition.
Indeed, they found that the group that had written in the third person exhibited more wisdom in their writing – they were more intellectually humble and showed better understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others.
These skills can help us navigate relationships and disagreements. Intriguingly, the third-person diarists were also better at predicting what they would feel towards another person if they ran into conflict with them in the future.
Self distancing
All this hints at a practical way of making better decisions in the heat of the moment: distancing from your immediate self.
If you’re facing a decision, such as whether to take a job abroad, think of yourself through other people’s eyes; think of yourself in the future and in the past.
One way to practise metacognition is to gather input from other people who may know more than you, people who have already moved abroad, for example, or decided not to.
“Seek out people who aren’t just going to agree with you,” says Dr Sam Johnson, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo and a colleague of Grossmann.
Such an exercise, dubbed social metacognition, could force you to take a different perspective. Indeed, studies have shown that when people are instructed to ‘consider the opposite view’, their confirmation bias reduces.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to consider every alternative viewpoint.
Grossmann gives the example of an astronomer giving a talk about the Solar System to a group of children. Suddenly, one child interrupts, saying that Earth is the centre of the Universe.
Doubting your own view in light of this comment wouldn’t amount to superior metacognition. As Grossmann explains, you need to be able to tell when there’s new and relevant evidence before you start questioning or doubting your initial view.
Distancing yourself over time can also be useful. “When you commit to a choice, it’ll change you,” says Grossmann. “But you don’t know how it’ll change you.”
For example, how would you feel in the future if you decided not to take that new job in another city? Are you someone who’s likely to keep thinking ‘what if I had’? But, equally, how would you feel if things didn’t work out as you had planned?
Perhaps it would take longer than you thought to make new friends, and you’d feel lonely. Are you good at making new friends? How do you generally cope with loneliness? Taking this broader view can ultimately help you make the right decision.
Knowing yourself, being critical of your thoughts and observing patterns from the past and projecting them onto the future, can be incredibly useful.
Perhaps you’re someone who is biased to taking risks and leaping into the unknown rather than being cautious, which could affect your decision.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with either approach, but it’s important to reflect on whether it has worked for you in the past.
Another thing you can do to harness your metacognition is to let decisions take time. Don’t just ‘go with your gut’ and stop at that; pay attention to signals that appear after that initial hunch.
“If you make a provisional decision to take that job and then wake up the next day and find yourself questioning your decision, it’s important to listen to that,” says Fleming.
“There are extended periods of reflection, especially after big decisions, and we shouldn’t be seduced into thinking our initial gut feeling is the right one.”
Grossmann believes it’s possible to train your metacognition, as his diary experiment showed that encouraging people to take different perspectives can lead to improved reflection.
There have also been studies showing that meditation training can improve metacognitive sensitivity.
This makes sense, says Grossmann.
“If you think about the Buddhist traditions, one key idea is around de-centering – this kind of mindfulness meditation is aiming to make you into this distant self where you’re not approaching things from an immediate perspective,” he says.
But before you start meditating, perhaps the first thing to do is simply try using your metacognition.
That doesn’t mean that you need to apply metacognition all the time – you don’t need it to decide what to have for lunch, for example, and for many financial decisions, it makes more sense to rely on maths and logic.
But when it comes to personal or social decisions, especially where there’s uncertainty and risk hanging over you, it’s worth pondering things more deeply.
Metacognition isn’t necessarily an easy fix. But it can help you identify the best approach for a given situation. If you’re overwhelmed by negative thoughts about yourself, a few positive affirmations might be a good idea.
But if you’re already optimistic and possibly even over-confident, they may be more of a hindrance than a help. Knowing yourself and what you need is crucial, and that ultimately requires metacognition.
So, before we scoff at the idea of thinking about thinking, we should keep in mind that it could improve our lives.
It shouldn’t have to be too taxing either – scientists have, after all, already done a lot of the thinking about thinking about thinking to guide us.
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