Chapter 6 in Dunlosky & Metcalfe discusses the concept of Retrospective Confidence, building up our understanding of the last metacognitive monitoring processes presented by the basic model of metacognition -- and at this point we've talked about all the angles of how/whether we know what we know or think we know. Retrospective confidence is a post-performance measure, while Judgment of Learning is a pre-performance measure and Feeling of Knowing is a during-performance measure. One of the findings that I found most intriguing is that absent conclusive evidence about one's performance on a given task, it's quite difficult to assess that performance. This may seem obvious, but society in general does not have many immediate/natural sources of feedback to help us guide and improve our performance, especially once we become adults. Performance reviews from bosses are rarely given more than once or twice a year if at all, asking a spouse or friend for feedback on one's social performance can be seen as fishing or simply awkward, and traditional learning approaches more often include questions without answer keys or rigorous processes for coaching people to understand their results. Day to day activities do not typically include "coaching" once some level of mastery is attained (driving, time management, cooking). Other types of feedback loops are more subtle or episodic (parenting, work performance, creative writing).
One topic I don't fully understand is how to more effectively counter the impact of poor retrospective confidence as an individual in real-life situations; it seems like reflection offers some insight, but it seems difficult to do this correctly without outside feedback.
I appreciated reading the efforts to understand the attempts to assess how psychological testing techniques might bias results; in particular it seems like real-life performance examples might be useful in making headway on this question. One example of a real-life situation is longitudinal studies of performance on tests like the SAT or ACT; another might be something relative to resistance to financial fraud or deceptive advertising.
In Chapter 7, we dug more deeply into source monitoring, and how this function can go awry. Under stress, or with age, the ability to tie contextual information to a particular memory can diminish. A crime victim might blame a tv star; we might think we thought of an idea when really we read it somewhere; a name might seem famous when really the name was just on a list you saw. Vivid dreams or readily-made images can also lead us to mistake reality with things we only imagined.
One area I still have questions about is how we might be able to recover, or restore, our sense of reality or a weakening source judgement. I wonder if there are types of therapy that are useful, something like sensory integration or other mind/body activities that help people to recognize or rebuild the connections between action and reality, or distinguish inside versus outside.
This week we also completed the Decisionmaking mindtools section. This section proposes and describes several methodologies to aid in making decisions. Using an instrument like the ones in the book seems useful in several ways: to declare and articulate a process; to encourage decisionmakers to consider angles more fully; to make explicit and document a decisionmaking process; to provide a mechanism for communicating a process. Establishing a decisionmaking process seems like a great way to break through analysis paralysis in project management, too.
In the working world I have seen many instances where a past decision was known but the thinking process used to arrive at that decision was unknown -- perhaps the decision was made by people were no longer there, or the thinking could not be recalled by those who were there. Those who were present when the decision was made are left in the unfortunate position of trying to speak to the decision and give a full accounting of it, which unfortunately is not completely reliable due to faulty recall. Oral historians can end up blamed for what happened. A more Machiavellian type might use the opportunity to manipulate the situation. Creating a decisionmaking document seems like an excellent way to prevent many of the unfortunate consequences of undocumented decisions -- repetition of the mistakes of the past, wasted work on re-discovery, paralysis because "it's always been that way" or "there must have been a good reason, and it'll bite us if we go back and change it now".
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