Thinking About Your Foolishness: Foolishness in Terms of Metacognition

As long as there is self-awareness, there will be foolishness. With the ability to reflect on one’s existence comes responsibility and a normative standard of behaviour. One perhaps distinctly human dimension of selfawareness is metacognition. ‘Thinking about your thinking’ is involved in regulating complex patterns of behaviour which may be maladaptive, selfdestructive, or a poor expression of ability. In other words, metacognition is involved in regulating behaviour that is foolish. It also has the power to reveal potentially foolish thoughts that are incorporated in these patterns. So even at first glance metacognition and foolishness are related. To understand how they intersect we first need to explore metacognition in greater depth. However, the idea pervading this exploration is that foolishness can be viewed in terms of deficiencies in the metacognitive process. We can begin by first better defining foolishness, and then applying relevant metacognitive models to this definition. Foolishness, to be used as a meaningful psychological concept, must fulfill two requirements. The first is that it be manifested in a pattern of behaviour. There are of course, foolish acts, but it is not productive to talk about the cognitive mechanisms operating behind them, as an isolated foolish act can frequently be explained away by irregularities of the situation. The second requirement is awareness. The person who behaves foolishly must have the knowledge that what they are doing is foolish; otherwise the behaviour can be attributed to ignorance, which is a very different problem. The individual’s awareness incorporates motivational factors that keep the foolishness mechanism running despite knowledge that the behaviour is maladaptive. This character is the essence of foolishness as it is used in psychological literature. The two factors defined here,