FALLIBLE FOX

Becoming Mindful of Mental Processes (Metacognition Part 2)

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If the goal is for us to get better at processing what we read, watch, and hear, it's necessary to understand and address aspects of our thinking that can get in the way. However, we shouldn't be overly optimistic about how easy this is—psychologists have found that mere awareness of fallible mental processes, like cognitive biases, may do very little to help us deal with them. For instance, simply being aware that feeling morally outraged can cause us to act hastily may do little to help us manage our online behaviour when we're actually feeling outraged. Likewise, simply being aware that humans are prone to several cognitive biases doesn't necessarily help us as individuals to surmount instances of bias in our own thinking. 

 

To make the awareness of hidden mental processes practically useful, we'll need to go a few steps further. We don't just want to know about systematic mental errors and stop there. Rather, we want to develop the capacity to identify our mental mistakes as they occur and take advantage of mental tools found to be effective in regulating our thinking. That's harder. 

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The next two sections of the Metacognition module will get us started on features and bugs of human mental life. Afterwards, we'll take a necessary next step to look at some tools for reflecting on and addressing these mental processes as we process the world around us.

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Limiting Our Focus

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​To get started, consider that researchers have developed a massive—and sometimes messy—literature on mental shortcuts, biases, and fallacious modes of reasoning that affect our thinking. Most of us, of course, don’t have time to wade through mountains of psychological concepts—this section will get you started on the right track without overburdening your mind. For those who wish to read further on these topics, some great entry points for thinking about human rationality and irrationality include What intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith Stanovich and Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

A small subset of ideas can get us started with achieving our aims. We can begin with the basic idea that most of our thinking is inaccessible to us—it's fast,  automatic, and often takes place outside of conscious awareness. While we can't live without it, our automatic and unconscious thought often oversimplifies things, hastily jump to conclusions, and exhibits biased information processing. As we move forward, it will help to be aware that things that are happening back there in the black box of our minds. The below section will introduce a simple idea to help us frame automatic and controlled thought.

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Automatic and Controlled Thought

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Psychologists often make use the idea of two general types of thought, we'll refer to as Type 1 thinking (fast, automatic, & often nonconscious) and Type 2 thinking (slow, controlled, & accessible to consciousness). As Daniel Kahneman (2011) argues, its useful as shorthand to have a mental representation of these two types of thought, although it's not a perfect representation of the mind's complexity (See Stanovich, 2009, for a slightly more complex but compatible view and Melnikoff & Bargh, 2018, for a critique). 

 

In short, many mental processes are automatic and occur outside of our awareness (Type 1 thinking). By contrast, we're at least partly consciously aware of, and feel like we can control, other mental processes (Type 2 thinking). The following are typical of Type 1 thought:

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• Intelligible formation of sentences as you converse with a friend.

• Arrival at intuitive answers to simple math questions (e.g., 2+2).

• Feelings of shame and the motivation to escape the moment as you convey an embarrassing story to a friend. 

 

The following are typical of Type 2 thought:

 

• The process of solving a math problem of moderate difficulty (e.g., 13 x 24).

• Learning how to drive or play a new song on the piano.

• Identifying and applying tools to overcome cognitive biases or an undesired emotional state.

 

Importantly, automatic processes (Type 1) continue to operate outside of awareness alongside effortful and deliberate processing (Type 2). Our more controlled and deliberate decisions, like choosing which sort of phone to buy, for example, are always informed by underlying Type 1 processes. For instance, even though you feel like you're making a rational decision, you may harbour unknown bias in favour of a particular company because you think the CEO is smart and like his sweaters. That is, no matter how well-reasoned and deliberate you may believe your decisions to be, there are generally things going on behind the facade of our conscious deliberation (Type 1 thought) that sway our choices. As we'll see, it's very hard—very often impossible—for individuals to uncover these hidden mental processes. 

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Think about this example adapted from Daniel Kahneman's, Thinking Fast and Slow. As an experienced driver, do you ever have to put effort into determining what a stop sign means when you see one? Do you have to effortfully work through which pedal stops the car? Do you consciously process when you should begin to slow down before coming to a stop? The answer to these questions is, of course, no (and if you answered yes, please don't drive in my neighbourhood!). Once learned, these are seamless processes requiring little deliberate thought—most of us can simultaneously have a meaningful conversation or follow a complex argument on a podcast.

 

When you're skimming tweets, scrolling your news feed, or glancing at several headlines, your unconscious mental life is operating in a similarly effortless way. Generally speaking, we are unaware of what's going on back there in Type 1 thought. For instance, we often move swiftly over and accept arguments that confirm our pre-existing beliefs while dismissing or spending more time criticizing arguments that run counter to our personal views (see part 3 of this module for more on this idea which is referred to as confirmation bias). We aren't usually doing this intentionally—that'd be odd.

 

Although we're generally unaware of how our intuitions are affecting how we're processing information, with some learning and effortful attention, we can sometimes take educated guess about when emotional states and cognitive biases might be causing us to think and act in particular ways. We'll work on these ideas in parts 3-5.

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Now, think about a hypothetical time on the road when you would need to switch into more deliberate and effortful (Type 2) thought. You're driving through a storm, at night, through twisting country roads—oh, and you're also in Ireland (i.e., assuming you normally drive on the right side of the road, you're now on the left). Further, your best friend and travel buddy is sitting beside you singing along to old Madonna songs. This situation requires way more conscious attention than your casual drive to work. For example, you still know what a stop sign looks like, but now they're not where you expect them to be because they're on the opposite side of the road. You need to make an effort and override the habitual response of where you tend to look and direct your eyes elsewhere. 

 

This extra effort requires deliberate, controlled attention. But because your conscious effort is a limited resource, you can probably tell that if you were in this situation, you'd likely need your friend to stop singing and turn down her music so you can focus. This is very different from the casual drive to work, in which a little more multitasking is possible.

 

Effortful & Deliberate Thought is Needed for Critical Thinking

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The drive to work versus drive in Ireland example is analogous to two different ways of reading information you find online. A leisurely, relatively carefree read is easy—watch a movie, chat with a friend, skim the article (maybe all at once!). By contrast, a read in which you want to fully grasp the content requires effortful attention. The limitations of Type 2 thinking mean that you're probably not going to be maximizing your capacity to take in and critique information if you're simultaneously watching a movie or or having a conversation.

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To get all the information you're looking for, you'd need to pay attention to how your biases and pre-existing beliefs might be directing your attention and thinking. Overriding your gut-level, intuitive evaluation of the information coming your way generally takes conscious effort. There is an important difference from the above "driving in Ireland" example—as you read, you're not in a life and death situation in which poor performance can cause you to go over a cliff or hit another car. Because the stakes are lower as we're consuming content, we often cruise on auto-pilot (Type 1 thinking), imagining we're processing what we read just fine, when we might actually be making some big mistakes.

 

Luckily, just like you'd eventually get used to driving in Ireland, effective ways of processing information can start to become automatic too—this requires knowledge of and integration of useful mental tools, which we'll continue to explore as we move through this module. 

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To summarize, most of our day to day media consumption is treated like recognizing and responding to a stop sign on the way to work—our intuitions and assumptions based on past experiences play a huge role (Type 1 thinking). We don't usually consider that effectively processing new information is generally a high-effort task (Type 2 thinking). That is, recognizing and overriding biases to effectively evaluate truth claims, arguments, and explanations is like successfully traveling through a storm, at night, through the weaving roads of the Irish countryside with your best friend nostalgically revisiting old songs her dad used to sing along to in the car. It's novel and difficult, so it requires focused, effortful attention.

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What's great, though, is that critical thinking can be like driving in Ireland in another way. After a while, you get used to it—some elements of good driving and good critical thinking become habitual or more automatic. It's all about practice.

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Next, we'll look at some of the automatic mental tendencies that can impair information processing and critical thinking. We'll loosely chunk these into what we'll call the ideological immune system. In many ways, your mind is set up in such a way that it tends to preserve your preexisting and desired views of the world, fending off ideas that seem to conflict with those views. These tendencies are often at the root of distortions in thought, misunderstandings between people, and strife on social media.