Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight: Implications for Debiasing and Public Information Campaigns

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the role of metacognitive experiences in judgment and decision making, and explores their implications for debiasing strategies and public information campaigns. Human reasoning is accompanied by a variety of metacognitive experiences, which provide experiential information that people systematically use in forming a judgment. These experiences qualify the implications of accessible declarative information, with the result that people's judgments can only be predicted by taking the interplay of declarative and experiential information into account. The chapter emphasizes on two of these experiences—namely, the ease or difficulty with which information can be brought to mind and thoughts can be generated, and the fluency with which new information can be processed. Accessibility experiences refer to the ease or difficulty with which information can be recalled and thoughts can be generated. According to most models of judgment, an object should be evaluated more favorably when many positive attributes are brought to mind, should consider an event more likely when many reasons are generated for its occurrence, and so on.

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