Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.
Leibniz Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen.
Cogn Sci. 2023 Mar;47(3):e13212. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13212.
Metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate our own cognitive processes, confers advantages to individuals and their own judgment. A more recent hypothesis, however, states that explicit metacognition may also enhance the collective judgment of groups, and may enhance human collaboration and coordination. Here, we investigate this social function hypothesis of metacognition with arguably one of the oldest collaboration problems humans face, common-pool resource use. Using an agent-based model that simulates repeated group interactions and the forming of collective judgments about resource extraction, we show that (1) in "kind" environments (where confidence and judgment accuracy correlate positively), explicit metacognition may allow groups to reach more accurate judgments compared to groups exchanging object-level information only; while (2) in "wicked" environments (where confidence and judgment accuracy correlate negatively), explicit metacognition may protect groups from the large judgment errors yielded by groups using metacognitive information for individual-level learning only (implicit metacognition). With explicit metacognition, this research highlights a novel mechanism which, among others, provides a testable explanation of the often-observed finding that groups all over the world communicate to enhance common property use.
元认知，即监控和评估自身认知过程的能力，为个体及其自身判断带来优势。然而，一个较新的假设指出，明确的元认知也可能增强群体的集体判断，并可能增强人类的协作和协调。在这里，我们用一种可以说是人类面临的最古老的合作问题之一的共同资源使用问题，来研究元认知的这种社会功能假说。我们使用一个基于代理的模型来模拟重复的群体互动和对资源提取的集体判断的形成，结果表明：(1) 在“友善”环境（即信心和判断准确性呈正相关）中，与仅交换对象级信息的群体相比，明确的元认知可能使群体能够做出更准确的判断；而(2) 在“恶劣”环境（即信心和判断准确性呈负相关）中，明确的元认知可能使群体免受因仅将元认知信息用于个体学习而导致的巨大判断错误的影响（内省元认知）。通过明确的元认知，本研究强调了一种新的机制，它为人们经常观察到的现象提供了一个可测试的解释，即世界各地的群体通过沟通来加强共同财产的使用。
