The aim of the article is firstly, to show how metacognitive monitoring, control (regulation) and metaknowledge are important in guiding decision making and secondly, to argue that researching experience is necessary for a more complete understanding of the role of metacognition in decision making. In the context of dual process theories of cognition it is sometimes proposed that people usually do not deliberate or reflect on their judgments and decisions, but rather follow their intuitions. Some metacognition researchers propose that metacognitive experiences (such as feeling of rightness or difficulty) play an important role in determining whether we change our intuitive responses for more deliberate, reflective reasoning and decision making. Although metacognition researchers' contribution to understanding the role of metacognitive experiences in decision making is valuable, their studies face some serious problems. Furthermore, it is not only our experiences, but also our evaluations of those experiences (metacognitive judgments) and our metacognitive knowledge that influence our judgments and choices. I argue that if we want to understand how and why people decide, we should be studying the entanglement of all these influencing factors from first and third person perspective. We should also conduct more thorough first person research. I conclude the article by arguing that first and third person perspective on metacognition and decision making should mutually constrain and inform each other about insights and contradictions that arise between them.

In the article, I will argue that metacognition plays an important role in decision-making not only as direct online monitoring and control of decision-making processes but also by enabling us to influence our decisions and actions -and mental states and processes, related to them -in an offline manner. That is, offline metacognition allows us to observe, refer to and, to a certain degree, exert influence on mental states and processes related to our decisions and actions in the way of being removed, decoupled from the task/decision at hand and present time demands. As such, it enables us to observe, form thoughts and have feelings about mental states and processes directly related to our future decisions, to plan our future decisions, to reflect on our past choices, and to think and have feelings about our broader goals, desires, and personal values that are indirectly related to our decisions.To illustrate the importance of offline metacognition in decision-making, I will firstly review and discuss some experimental findings on implementation intentions ("decisions about the future") and anticipated emotions (beliefs about future emotional states related to outcomes of our decisions). Secondly, I will argue that our ability to reflect (think and feel) on our broader goals, desires and personal values -that represent a kind of structure into which our specific decisions are embeddedreveals how offline metacognition can exert influence on our decisions also in an indirect way. All in all, I will try to show that our ability to refer to our own minds in an offline way -be it to mental states and processes directly or indirectly related to specific decisions -is essential for us to decide, as we decide, and act, as we act.

In the following article we first present the growing trend of incorporating neuroscience into the law, and the growing acceptance of and trust in neuroscience’s mechanistic and reductionistic explanations of the human mind. We then present and discuss some studies that show how nudging peoples’ beliefs about matters related to human agency (such as free will, decision-making, or self-control) towards a more deterministic, mechanistic and/or reductionistic conception, exerts an influence on their very actions, mentality, and brain processes. We suggest that the neuroscientific view of the human mind exerts an influence on the very cognitive phenomena neuroscience falsely believes to be studying objectively. This holds especially when we consider the systematic integration of neuroscience into the public domain, such as the law. For, such an integration acts as a reinforcement of the public’s and legal decision-makers’ endorsement of and trust in neuroscience’s view of human nature that further changes how people think and act. Such looping effects of neurolaw are probably inevitable. Accordingly, we should be aware of the scope of neuroscientific explanations and be careful not to overstate neuroscientific evidence and findings in legal contexts.

In the article I will defend the view that cognitive science needs to use first-and second-person methods more systematically, as part of everyday research practice, if it wants to understand the human mind in its full scope. Neurophenomenological programme proposed by Varela as a remedy for the hard problem of consciousness (i.e. the problem of experience) does not solve it on the ontological level. Nevertheless, it represents a good starting point of how to tackle the phenomenon of experience in a more systematic, methodologically sound way. On the other hand, Varela's criterion of phenomenological reduction as a necessary condition for systematic investigation of experience is too strong. Regardless of that and some other problems that research of experience faces (e.g. the problem of training, the question of what kind of participants we want to study), it is becoming clear that investigating experience seriously -from first-and second-person perspective -is a necessary step cognitive science must take. This holds especially when researching phenomena that involve consciousness and/or where differentiation between conscious and unconscious processing is crucial. Furthermore, gathering experiential data is essential for interpreting experimental results gained purely by quantitative methods -especially when we are implicitly or explicitly referring to experience in our conclusions and interpretations. To support these claims some examples from the broader area of decision making will be given (the effect of deliberation-without-attention, cognitive reflection test).

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