metacognition
Definition
Metacognition refers to the cognitive capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes, particularly the ability to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate judgments. Within intellectual humility research, metacognitive awareness of one's own limitations is treated as a defining feature common to most conceptual accounts of the construct. A key empirical question is whether higher intellectual humility corresponds to better metacognitive discernment, defined operationally as the type-2 signal detection theory measure of one's ability to tell apart correct from incorrect responses on a truthfulness task. In a study of 246 U.S. participants who judged the veracity of news headlines and then decided whether to report or withhold each judgment, intellectual humility scores correlated positively with type-2 d' (r = .19 to .25, p < .005), indicating that more intellectually humble individuals were better at identifying which of their own responses were accurate. This association with metacognitive discernment, rather than with response bias, also served as convergent validity evidence for the self-report intellectual humility scales used in the study.
Sources: Prike et al. (2024)
Related Terms
- misinformation (1 shared article)
- intellectual humility (1 shared article)
- signal detection theory (1 shared article)
Applications
Metacognition and Intellectual Humility
Intellectual humility and metacognition are conceptually linked because awareness of the limits of one's own knowledge is a core component of most definitions of intellectual humility. Empirically, higher scores on three intellectual humility scales predicted better metacognitive discernment on a type-2 signal detection task, with correlations ranging from r = .19 to .25, while showing no reliable association with metacognitive response bias.
Sources: Prike et al. (2024)
Metacognition and Misinformation Discernment
The study distinguished between type-1 discernment, the ability to correctly classify true and false headlines, and type-2 metacognitive discernment, the ability to identify which of one's own truthfulness judgments were correct. Participants who scored higher on intellectual humility showed improvement on both measures, suggesting that the same individual difference trait relates to accurate external judgment and accurate self-assessment of those judgments.
Sources: Prike et al. (2024)
