Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Authors' Conclusion

• Metacognitive feelings can also shape thinking outside the confines of well-crafted experimental settings and niche environments like University Challenge. Here is a dramatic historical example: in 1983, deafening alarms went off in the nuclear early warning facility in Serpukhov. The system indicated that five ballistic missiles were heading from the United States to the Soviet Union. It was down to Lt Colonel Stanislav Petrov to make a split decision. ‘False alarm,’ Petrov told the Soviet air defence forces, averting nuclear war. When a reporter asked how he was able to make the right call under such enormous pressure, Petrov said: ‘I had a funny feeling in my gut.’
• As such examples illustrate, we shouldn’t think of feelings as ‘getting in the way’ of higher cognitive processes; they play a crucial role in thinking. The feeling of knowing was found to accurately reflect the quality of learning in one previous study. And when people have to choose what to restudy for tests, they rely on their feelings of knowing in an adaptive way. There are similar findings for other metacognitive feelings. For instance, an experiment using a multiple-choice test as a paradigm found that the strategic use of tip-of-the-tongue experiences led to better scores.
• This does not mean, however, that you should trust your guts blindly. In fact, metacognitive feelings can sometimes lead you astray. In a cleverly designed experiment, participants were given a sentence in which one word was scrambled, such as: ‘Free will is a powerful oinliusl.’ Then, they had to solve the anagram, resulting in a sentence that encapsulated a particular worldview: ‘Free will is a powerful illusion.’ Participants were then asked to rate the sentence on a truth scale, from definitely false to definitely true. They were also asked if they had experienced an ‘aha’ moment. The researchers found that participants rated the statement as truer when they had experienced ‘aha’ moments after solving the anagram. The problem is that, in this case, the metacognitive feeling had been artificially induced. Obviously, whether or not you get a feeling of sudden insight after solving the anagram ‘oinliusl’ has no bearing on whether free will is an illusion.
• The need for caution applies to other metacognitive feelings as well. Tweaking the cues that elicit such feelings is, in all likelihood, an important element in the workings of misinformation, advertising and populist propaganda. This is particularly significant since feelings of truth have a strong influence on what we take to be true in the first place. Feelings can be manipulated and, depending on the context, they might be misleading. This makes awareness of metacognitive feelings only more important. So, pay attention to your feelings when you are thinking – but do so wisely.