Metacognition
Thinking about, monitoring, and regulating your own thinking.
What it means
Metacognition is awareness and control of one's own cognitive processes — knowing what you know and don't know, monitoring comprehension and confidence as you go, and deploying strategies to direct learning and reasoning. Flavell distinguished two broad components: metacognitive knowledge (beliefs about how one's mind, tasks, and strategies work) and metacognitive regulation (the planning, monitoring, and evaluating that steer cognition in real time). The mechanism by which it improves performance is error-catching and calibration: by checking the products of intuition against explicit standards, strong metacognition helps suppress wrong first answers, allocate study effort to weak spots, and align confidence with actual accuracy. A central nuance is that metacognitive judgments are themselves fallible and often miscalibrated — fluent, familiar material feels better learned than it is, and the least skilled tend to have the poorest insight into their own deficits, the heart of the Dunning–Kruger pattern. It matters for learning, expertise, and good judgment, since the simple metacognitive habit of asking 'how do I know this, and what would make me wrong?' is one of the most transferable debiasing moves available.
Examples
Pausing before committing to a decision to ask 'what evidence would prove me wrong here, and how confident should I really be?'
A student rereads her notes, feels fluent, and stops revising, then bombs the exam; a classmate who quizzes himself notices the gaps and spends his last hour exactly where he is weakest.
A doctor notices a case fits the obvious diagnosis a little too neatly and asks what else could explain the symptoms, checking the fast answer against the evidence before acting on it.
First described in John Flavell (1979).