In my study of the human factors that predict positive life outcomes, metacognition stands out as distinct from so many others. Metacognitive strategies are relatively easy to teach and can have an immediate impact on people’s lives. In contrast, cognitive, affective, and social factors tend to be slow and effortful to develop. And yet, metacognitive strategies must operate in a powerful, often non-rational, subjective landscape. Like any tool, you must choose to use them, which means in the end you must believe that the tool is worth the effort.

This week’s research roundup explores multiple examples of these subjective landscapes affecting peoples choices. The first shows we are systematically bad judges at which experiences best drive learning—shockingly, we don’t like it if it feels hard. The second shows that we vary in how well we know what we don't know, driving gaps between our confidence and our reliability. The third quantifies the subjective cost we assign to the very act of exerting self-control or effortful cognition.

Knowing what the best metacognitive strategy is (metacognitive knowledge) is insufficient. We must also contend with metacognitive illusions about their effectiveness, individual differences in assessing the reliability of our own judgments, and the quantifiable subjective cost of deploying them, all of which require significant emotional intelligence and willpower to navigate against our immediate impulses and feelings of discomfort or effort.

This is the sometimes paradoxical nature of metacognitive strategies. They can operate as bridges over our own cognitive, affective, and social weaknesses, but only if we choose to use them. And those very choices are influenced by…cognitive, affective, and social context.

Despite this tension, individuals’ use of metacognitive strategies to compliment their weaknesses is one of the most impactful yet underappreciated human factors in elite talent.

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Research Roundup

Just stick wax in your ears

“Since Odysseus committed to resisting the Sirens…” Far too few science papers open with such poetry…bad poetry, but I still genuinely appreciate the effort. What could merit such a line: research on pricing the cost of self-control.

How much would you pay to avoid temptation?

Not only will we pay good money “to avoid having to exert self-control”, the amount “scales with increasing levels of temptation”. Importantly for my own research, the amount also increases with increasing “stress exposure” and “motivational incentives”.

You’ll try anything if you believe your hard work will pay off; for everything else, there’s MasterCard.

As a rule I’m wary of willingness-to-pay (WtP) as a truly universal, invariant tool, but it does give a useful metric for this very hard problem.

In my “subjective utility” research, people’s choices track with their direct experience rather than with their intellectual understanding of a choice. Perhaps we could induce an interaction between WtP and SU: would individuals make different WtP choices for themselves versus their prediction for others in identical contexts?

Meta-Uncertainty: You Know What You Don’t Know What You Don't Know

What is “meta-uncertainty”? Well it’s a person’s “uncertainty about the uncertainty of the variable that informs their decision”, of course! And while that concept might make your head spin, it is crucial to understanding why our confidence isn’t always reliable.

New research shows that “meta-uncertainty varies across subjects, is stable over time, generalizes across some domains and can be manipulated experimentally”. In other words, our sensitivity to our own uncertainty is a potentially core human factor. How many leaders have made disastrous decisions for lack of sensitivity to their own uncertainty?

Who is better at meta-uncertainty? How can it be trained? Is it purely metacognitive? Probably not, if it’s so stable; so are there core cognitive, affective, or even social factors that enhance meta-uncertainty?

P.S. The paper starts with the line, “Decisions vary in difficulty.” The ignoble awards needs a special prize for “worst opening line”. I nominate this one for its powerful statement of almost completely valueless truth.

Metacognitive illusions in learning

Here’s a conundrum for education and human development: the very experiences that drive the greatest learning cause students to feel that they’ve learned less.

A new paper calls out this metacognitive illusion. While exploring well known effects of “spaced retrieval” in learning, the authors added in variability in the study materials to measure the impact on learning outcomes. Sure enough, variability boosted learning. Great…except…

These “benefits were not appreciated by the learners who judged learning to be more effective with constant rather than variable” experiences.

This has crucial implications well beyond education. Anyone doing product design or user experience testing needs to understand how these metacognitive illusions can drive all of your hard work in the wrong direction.

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SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I watched the entire new series of Love, Death & Robots on my flight back from Europe last week. As with previous series the satirical ones—stupid humans, snarky robots, antihero cats—are the consistent highlights. (Scalzi’s always good, but Joe Abercrombie dabbles in grimdark humor.) Of the others, “400 Boys” sticks with me the most: a future not much worth fighting for, "heroes" not much worth rooting for,…giant monster babies—but it’s got so much style.

Stage & Screen

• June 9, Philadelphia: "How to Robot-Proof Your Kids" with Big Brothers, Big Sisters!
• September 18, Oakland: Reactive Conference
• Sep 28-Oct 3, South Africa: Finally I can return. Are you in SA? Book me!
• October, UK: More med school education

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming