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Originally Posted by JesseQuinn
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sitting here waiting on my ride stuck in traffic and so into this topic, so apologies for droning on. metacognition was involved a lot in one of my areas of study and I find it so fucking fascinating
lots of peeps think that this ability is present solely in humans but really, how do we know?
not being super-aware of how one thinks isn't a sign one is stupid btw. it's like good abs, ya just gotta work for it
I guess the best way to describe why this is not related to intellect is through describing heuristics, which is an evolutionary trait that absolutely kept our species alive so we could all end up fighting on the internet 140 chars at a time (they'd be so proud!!) =)
heuristics is basically our ability to subconsciously group together items of information, disregard irrelevant discrepancies and arrive at a quick conclusion, often referred to as mental short-cuts
for example we can quickly look at three cats who are different sizes, shapes & colors and automatically recognize all of them as cats. this served our cave-dwelling ancestors fighting off wolves, etc well. they didn't have to deeply study each predator individually (uh, is that wolf tall enough to be a wolf?) to discern that threat was imminent
as heuristics are heavily involved in placing things, concepts and people into categories without much conscious thought you can see how they can be unhelpful when presented with new experiences-and people in our present era. esp when so much of our media is focused on divisions between 'groups'
point is, we're not living in caves anymore. we all need to hold ourselves to a higher standard (and that goes for me too, not separating myself from humanity here) in thinking over knee-jerk reacting
for that to happen metacognition has to play a role. I cannot believe I'm thanking measles-boy for posting a thread but gracias for this, it was fun for me at least
lecture over, I'm off to dance. have a wicked night y'all