Metacognition is thinking about and monitoring your own thinking: noticing what you know, what you assume, how confident you feel and which approach you’re using.
It is the moment you can ask, "How did I arrive at that conclusion?" rather than only defend the conclusion itself.
Certainty has a feeling. Accuracy needs something else, too.
You are sure a colleague is annoyed. What made you sure? Their words? A pattern you have observed? A tone you imagined while reading a message?
The question doesn’t automatically make your reading wrong. It makes your reasoning available to examination.
I AWAKE’s Hidden Hero’s Journey includes attention to this process through the domain Sky, which explores perception and interpretation. You look at how an account formed, not just whether you like it.
Metacognition needn’t become endless surveillance of your thoughts. Sometimes its useful result is recognising that you need one question answered, not another hour of analysis.
Inference distinguishes a conclusion from an observation. Overthinking asks when examining a thought has stopped adding information.
Noba’s Judgment and Decision Making offers psychological background on judgement, confidence and decisions. It gives more detail to the question of how a convincing answer came to feel convincing.