---
name: metacognition
description: "Review how a judgment was formed without confusing confidence, outcome and hindsight with decision quality. Use for retrospectives, decision journals and learning from past choices."
---

# Metacognition

Review how a judgment was formed without confusing confidence, outcome and hindsight with decision quality. Use for retrospectives, decision journals and learning from past choices.

## When to use

- A good result is being treated as proof that the original decision process was good.
- A bad result makes earlier warning signs feel obvious in retrospect.
- A review is mainly testing arguments that support the preferred story.
- A person or team wants to learn from a decision without rewriting what was knowable at the time.

## Workflow

1. Reconstruct what information, options and constraints were actually available when the decision was made.
2. Separate the quality of the decision process from the eventual outcome.
3. Compare original confidence, assumptions and predictions with the contemporaneous record when one exists.
4. Generate at least one alternative explanation for the result, including luck, environment changes and missing information.
5. Identify which part of the process should be repeated, changed or instrumented next time.
6. Write a concrete review trigger or decision-journal field that will make the next retrospective less dependent on memory.

## Required output

- What was knowable then
- Decision process vs outcome
- Original assumptions / confidence
- Alternative explanations
- Learning that transfers
- Change for the next decision

## Evidence and safety boundaries

- Do not use the outcome alone to grade the original decision.
- Do not claim warning signs were obvious without contemporaneous evidence.
- Do not turn the review into a personality judgment.
- Distinguish a repeatable process lesson from a one-off story.
## Evidence-linked lenses

Use these as candidate lenses, not diagnoses:

- [Outcome Bias](https://cognitive-biases.github.io/biases/cognitive-bias-outcome-bias/) — Outcome bias occurs when knowledge of a result changes how people evaluate the quality of a decision even when the information available at the time of the decision is held constant. Outcomes can still be relevant for learning, so the error is not 'never look at results'; it is using luck or hindsight as if it had been available to the original decision-maker.
- [Hindsight Bias](https://cognitive-biases.github.io/biases/cognitive-bias-hindsight-bias/) — Knowing an outcome can make the outcome look more predictable in retrospect. The effect has been studied for decades and across many settings, but it does not mean that every confident explanation after an event is biased.
- [Confirmation Bias](https://cognitive-biases.github.io/biases/cognitive-bias-confirmation-bias/) — Confirmation bias is an umbrella label for several ways existing beliefs or hypotheses can influence information search and interpretation. It should not be reduced to one behaviour such as reading only agreeable news, and a preference for confirming tests is not irrational in every task or environment.
- [Moral Luck](https://cognitive-biases.github.io/biases/attribution-bias-moral-luck/) — Resultant moral luck describes cases where judgments of blame, punishment, or moral evaluation differ because otherwise similar actions lead to different outcomes partly outside the agent's control. Outcome information does affect moral judgment in experiments, but the effect should not be reduced to 'people ignore intent.' Mental states, causal responsibility, belief justification, negligence, and the kind of moral judgment being asked about all matter. Some studies find that false or unjustified beliefs explain more of classic moral-luck asymmetries than the bad outcome itself, while still detecting an independent outcome effect.

## References

- [Decision skill](https://cognitive-biases.github.io/skills/metacognition/)
- [Decision guides](https://cognitive-biases.github.io/contexts/)

## Portability

This is an instruction-only Agent Skill. It requires no secrets, no executable scripts and no network access to run. If source-access tools are available, use the linked Cognitive Biases material to preserve review state and uncertainty.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Commercial reuse requires prior written permission.