Metacognitive Myopia: A Major Obstacle on the Way to Rationality

Abstract

The notion of metacognitive myopia refers to a conspicuous weakness of the quality control of memory and reasoning processes. Although people are often remarkably sensitive even to complex samples of information when making evaluative judgments and decisions, their uncritical and naive tendency to take the validity of sampled information for granted constitutes a major obstacle to rational behavior. After illustrating this phenomenon with reference to prominent biases (base-rate neglect, misattribution, perseverance), we decompose metacognitive myopia into two distinct but intertwined functions, monitoring and control. We offer explanations for why effectively monitoring the biases resulting from information sampling in an uncertain world is so difficult and why the control function is severely restricted by the lack of volitional control over mental actions. Because of these and other difficulties, metacognitive myopia constitutes a major obstacle to rational judgment and decision making.

Changing Your Mind About the Data: Updating Sampling Assumptions in Inductive Inference

“…The current work highlights how flexible people can be when using information about sample generation processes to make inferences from sample data. These results challenge a strong version of the meta-cognitive myopia argument (Fiedler et al, 2023), which holds that people generally neglect sample generation when making judgments and decisions. That said, it is clear that there are many situations in which people do fail to factor biased sample selection into their inferences (e.g., Feiler et al, 2013;Fiedler et al, 2000).…”

Asymmetric sampling of personality (ASP): A novel approach to understanding validity limits in personality assessment and possible remedies

“…Because of these inter-individual differences, the self-reports of multiple respondents are differentially biased by the differences between their individual samples of situations experienced. Importantly, research shows that these interindividual differences in personal preferences for personality extremes are rich and that they depend on a variety of psychological factors (e.g., Brown & Sacco, 2017;Buss & Barnes, 1986;Furnham & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2005;Tan et al, 2018) and on undetected environmental sampling constraints (e.g., Fiedler, 2000;Fiedler et al, 2023).…”