Social metacognition: Thinking about thinking in social psychology

Metacognition is thinking about thinking. Specically, metacognition refers to a person’s thoughts about his or her own thoughts or thought processes. One useful way to think about metacognition is to distinguish between primary and secondary cognition. Primary thoughts are those that occur at a direct level of cognition and involve our initial associations of an object with some attribute, such as “that car is beige” or “I like tennis.” These thoughts are often called “object level” thoughts (Nelson & Narens, 1990).