All articles tagged with "Metacognition"
Metacognition — thinking about your own thinking — is one of the most teachable and consequential cognitive skills. Explore Flavell's framework, calibration, the limits of introspection, and how metacognition improves learning and mental health.
McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks in broad daylight wearing no disguise — he had rubbed lemon juice on his face and believed it made him invisible to cameras. The Dunning-Kruger effect: why the skills needed to perform a task are the same skills needed to evaluate performance, and why this creates a double burden that is almost impossible to escape from the inside.
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight without a disguise. When police showed him surveillance footage, he was genuinely baffled. He had rubbed lemon juice on his face, believing it would make him invisible to cameras. This story prompted David Dunning and Justin Kruger's 1999 study: people with limited knowledge systematically overestimate their competence — because the skills needed to recognize incompetence are the same skills needed to perform competently.
Decision journaling is the practice of recording your reasoning at the time of a decision and reviewing outcomes later. The most practical method for identifying and correcting systematic biases in your own thinking.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how incompetence impairs the ability to recognise incompetence. But recent reanalyses have complicated the original findings. Here is what the evidence shows.
The Dunning-Kruger effect explained: the original 1999 research, the replication debates, what it actually claims vs the meme version, and what it means in practice.