Metacognition, public health compliance, and vaccination willingness.

Metacognition, our ability to reflect on our own beliefs, manifests itself in the confidence we have in these beliefs, and helps us guide our behavior in complex and uncertain environments. Here, we provide empirical tests of the importance of metacognition during the pandemic. Bayesian and frequentist analyses demonstrate that citizens with higher metacognitive sensitivity-where confidence differentiates correct from incorrect COVID-19 beliefs-reported higher willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19, and higher compliance with recommended public health measures.

Contested science: Individuals with higher metacognitive insight into interpretation of evidence are less likely to polarize.

Societal polarization over contested science has increased in recent years. To explain this development, political, sociological, and psychological research has identified societal macro-phenomena as well as cognitive micro-level factors that explain how citizens reason about the science. Here we take a radically different perspective, and highlight the effects of metacognition: How citizens reason about their own reasoning.