Metacognition (original) (raw)

The citation for this chapter is: Schwarz, N (2015). Metacognition. In M. Mikulincer, P.R. Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology: . Washington, DC: APA example, the thing it describes seems frequent, true and low in risk. This chapter reviews core themes and insights of metacognitive research, illustrates them with representative findings, and addresses the implications of metacognitive processes for topics that are central to social psychology. It is organized as follows. The first section introduces basic concepts and process assumptions that cut across different areas of metacognitive research. The second section addresses how people evaluate their own thoughts. It begins with a short summary of core issues of metacognition research in cognitive psychology, namely, metamemory judgments of knowing and learning and their implications. It then turns to current issues of metacognition research in social psychology and discusses how people determine whether information, including their own beliefs, can be trusted. Of particular interest are the processes underlying judgments of truth, confidence, and related measures of attitude strength, and their implications for people's susceptibility to, and correction of, misinformation. The third section addresses judgments of liking and preference and highlights the affective component of metacognitive experiences. Next, the fourth section explores how people use lay theories of mental processes to draw inferences from the dynamics of their own thinking about states of the external world, as reflected in judgments of risk, novelty or temporal distance. The final section addresses the detection and correction of judgmental biases. The chapter concludes by noting current Metacognition --3 ambiguities and outlining issues for future research. Throughout, the focus is on people's thoughts about their own thoughts and the downstream implications of these metacognitive assessments for judgment and behavior; people's thoughts about other people's thoughts are outside the scope of this chapter (and are addressed by Pronin, this volume).