Did I consider that? How metacognition can improve (your) decision-making

When was the last time you were questioning how you were thinking? Most of us frequently assess decision outcomes, but rarely do we reflect on the cognitive processes producing them. 

The same is (somewhat) true for behavioural insights as a field. Over the last 20 years, the most visible behavioural change approach has been nudging, which targets immediate decision outcomes via minor adjustments in people’s choice environments. Nudges have been widely adopted in policymaking, marketing, and other fields. Examples include adjusting plate sizes to reduce food intake, making organ donation the default, or telling people about the tax compliance of their peers ¹. 

While nudges have demonstrated their value for changing decision outcomes across many domains, they have recently faced increasing criticism due to their small effects, limited societal impact, and paternalistic nature. This has led behavioural scientists to rethink their behaviour change approaches and sparked research on alternative strategies, most prominently boosting ^2,3. 

From nudging to boosting

Instead of adjusting choice environments to achieve (immediate) decision outcomes, boosting concentrates on building (long-term) competencies. It aims to empower people to reach self-chosen objectives. This enables boosting to better handle uncertainty and conflicting priorities, both of which hinder the ability to define a universally desirable outcome beforehand–especially for researchers or policymakers. At the same time, recent research indicates that boosting’s effects could indeed persist longer than those of nudges, potentially even when the intervention is removed ⁴. 

Many of today’s decision environments are ultra-processed, meaning that they are already engineered to nudge our decisions in a certain direction. Think, for example, of how grocery stores position products on their shelves or how online stores use ‘click-to-pay’ buttons. These might cause decisions that do not align with our objectives, such as eating healthy, consuming less, or reducing our screen time. As these micro-level decisions are connected to global challenges like climate change, building the competencies to navigate them is not only relevant for one’s individual well-being but also for society as a whole ⁵.

What is metacognition?

One promising yet less-known approach to boosting is the induction of metacognition, i.e., ‘thinking about thinking’. Metacognition entails those cognitive processes that monitor, control, and evaluate your mental operations ⁶. Decades of research, primarily in developmental psychology and cognitive science, have shown that it is decisive for detecting both strengths and weaknesses in one’s cognitive activities. The concept spans multiple sub-domains like metacognitive knowledge, control, and experience with distinctive characteristics.

Imagine you are writing an email to a colleague about a study you just read (or a blog article about metacognition). At some point, you might realise that you did not grasp the facts well enough to explain them to your colleague (metacognitive experience). This might then urge you to update your beliefs about your understanding of that study (metacognitive knowledge). As a consequence, you might re-read the study or ask an LLM to explain it to you (metacognitive control). 

This example illustrates how metacognition can protect you from making a maladaptive decision, in this case, misinterpreting a study in your email. 

Metacognition to improve decision-making processes

Metacognition can enhance self-reflection competencies, as demonstrated in the example above. Metacognitive interventions aim to improve these competencies. Thereby, they can enable you to detect errors in your decision-making. This is why they could be an antidote to overconfidence and confirmation bias, increasing the openness to novel (belief-disconfirming) information ^7,8. 

So how can you harness metacognition to improve your decision-making or that of others?

While research on metacognitive interventions for behavioural public policy is scarce, there are proven techniques for using metacognition to improve decision-making. The main characteristic of these interventions is that they encourage reflection, either by instructing people to reflect, training them in self-reflection, or prompting them to reflect. Although many people already somewhat use these techniques, e.g., when preparing for a presentation or writing a report, consciously employing them might enable you to improve your decision-making.

A practical pathway to eliciting metacognition is the use of reflective questions. Today, these are already used in hospital settings where, for instance, nurses use checklists when taking in a patient ⁹. Let’s go back to the email you might be writing to your colleague. You could develop a list with reflection questions to check your understanding of a study each time after you read it–e.g., asking yourself whether you comprehended the research question and methodology. Or you could co-develop such a list with your colleagues and provide each new joiner with it, allowing them to build reflection competencies in the most relevant domains. 

You can also train or instruct yourself and others to increase metacognitive insight. For example, you can train yourself or others in self-evaluation or reflective cognitive strategies ¹⁰. These strategies can span distinctive decision-making steps, such as solution planning and monitoring, and best practices for reflection within them. 

Finally, you can use simulations to improve your self-reflection competencies. Simulations of real-world decision-making, such as role-play, can help you identify and understand flaws in your decision-making that might otherwise go undetected in a non-simulated environment ¹¹. 

You can also pair these techniques and, for example, integrate reflection questions in a training programme. 

Where metacognition could matter (most)

Metacognition could be particularly relevant in politicised domains (e.g., climate change), where confirmation bias can cause the rejection of evidence and confidence can be detached from one’s actual knowledge. In addition, it might also help people in recognising misinformation by encouraging truth-searching behaviours ⁸. 

While behavioural insights research on metacognition is still in its early phases, existing work signals that it can be a pathway to making better decisions for ourselves and society. Sometimes it might even be enough to ask yourself: Did I consider that?

References

1. Viale, R. Nudging. (MIT Press, London, United Kingdom, 2022).

2. Hofmann, W. et al. Rethinking behaviour change interventions in policymaking. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02284-5 (2025) doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02284-5.

3. Hertwig, R. & Grüne-Yanoff, T. Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions. Perspectives on Psychological Science 12, 973–986 (2017).

4. Paunov, Y. & Grüne-Yanoff, T. Boosting vs. nudging sustainable energy consumption: a long-term comparative field test in a residential context. Behavioural Public Policy 1–26 (2023) doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2023.30.

5. Hertwig, R., Michie, S., West, R. & Reicher, S. Moving from nudging to boosting: empowering behaviour change to address global challenges. Behavioural Public Policy 9, 874–885 (2025).

6. Fleming, S. M. Metacognition and Confidence: A Review and Synthesis. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 75, 241–268 (2024).

7. Batha, K. & Carroll, M. Metacognitive training aids decision making. Aust. J. Psychol. 59, 64–69 (2007).

8. Fischer, H. & Fleming, S. Why metacognition matters in politically contested domains. Trends Cogn. Sci. 28, 783–785 (2024).

9. Chew, K. S., van Merrienboer, J. J. G. & Durning, S. J. Perception of the usability and implementation of a metacognitive mnemonic to check cognitive errors in clinical setting. BMC Med. Educ. 19, 18 (2019).

10. Boswell, R. G., Sun, W., Suzuki, S. & Kober, H. Training in cognitive strategies reduces eating and improves food choice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 115, E11238–E11247 (2018).

11. Hartstein, A. J., Zimney, K., Verkuyl, M., Yockey, J. & Berg-Poppe, P. Virtual Reality Instructional Design in Orthopedic Physical Therapy Education: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Physical Therapy Education 36, 176–184 (2022).