What I Study

I’m an experimental psychologist who studies thinking quality. Thinking quality is how well our thinking serves us, how clearly we can see what our minds are doing, and our ability to adapt it when needed.

Thinking quality is broader than intelligence, knowledge or traditional critical thinking techniques. Before people can improve their thinking, they must become better at seeing it: the meaning they attach to ideas, the beliefs and assumptions they carry, what they notice or ignore, and the thinking strategies they are using.

I believe we have far more capacity to understand and improve our own thinking than we currently know how to access. And that capacity is fundamentally individual. There is no single universal map of good thinking because people do not think the same way.

Where My Work Began

I started with a traditional question: How can people make better decisions and avoid predictable errors of reasoning?

My early work focused on known strategies including challenging assumptions, considering alternative explanations, questioning evidence, recognizing our biases, and using structured methods to improve judgment.

I began noticing that knowing the same technique or using the same methods did not mean that professionals understood or used them the same way. Even when people appeared to reach the same conclusion, there were differences in what that conclusion meant to them.

This shift changed the question I was asking.

An Early Clue

In 2016, as part of my doctoral research, I conducted a controlled experiment with 264 experienced auditors. I was interested in whether different kinds of prompting could improve reasoning.

One group was prompted with standard professional guidance, which I describe as outward-oriented instructions routinely given to professionals about how a task should be performed. Another group received a short metacognitive prompt that directed attention inward, toward their own reasoning processes.

At the time, I saw this as a finding about reasoning. Looking back, though, it contained an early clue about the question that would become central to my work: perhaps improving thinking requires more than simply giving better instructions (outward guidance). It may require helping them to see more clearly what is happening within their own minds (inward attention to reasoning).

From the Laboratory to the Field

After completing the study, I began taking the same reasoning problems into professional conferences and working through them with live audiences.

Over the next ten years, I put the problems in front of professionals who are responsible for making consequential decisions and asked them not just what they decided, but how they got there. We discussed their answers, compared their reasoning with others in the room, and with past audiences. As new patterns began to emerge, I changed the questions and added follow-up problems.

The most instructive information was not whether someone reached the correct answer, but what became visible when they attempted to explain their thinking.

People who had received similar training, working under the same professional standards, and using the same tools, would interpret the same facts differently. Often, they were surprised by differences in their own reasoning they had never noticed.

The Thinker Was the Variable

The pattern was remarkably consistent: professionals with similar training, using the same standards and tools, could look at the same information and reach different conclusions. Sometimes the difference occurred in the same person. The same problem considered at another time or in a different context could produce different and even contradictory judgments.

Many professional systems are designed to reduce this kind of variability. Standards, procedures and decision tools are intended to improve judgment reliability. As I looked closer, though, the standardization wasn’t eliminating the differences in thinking. It was just concealing them.

The facts may be the same. The training may be the same. The tools may be the same. But the thinker was not.

What if the variability we work so hard to eliminate is telling us something important about how people construct meaning, direct their attention, select strategies and understand what is in front of them?

There is considerably more going on inside human thinking than our systems are designed to recognize.

What is Happening in the Thinker?

The divergence of responses led me to a deeper question: What is happening in the thinker that they have not learned to see?

We often treat better thinking as a problem of effort or technique. While those approaches can help, they assume we can already see our own thinking clearly enough to know what needs to change.

I believe that is the missing capability.

To improve our thinking, we must first be able to see it: what we mean and what we believe, what we assume, what we are paying attention to, and what strategies we are using.

We have not learned to see our thinking with that kind of resolution.

Learning to See Your Own Mind

Seeing our own thinking more clearly is not simply becoming more self-aware. It requires learning to make finer distinctions within our own cognition.

I use the term metacognitive discrimination to describe this increasing ability to perceive distinctions within our own thinking. Much like perceptual discrimination allows us to notice finer differences in what we see, hear, feel, or taste, metacognitive discrimination develops greater resolution in how we perceive our own mental processes.

The more we refine our noticing of those differences, the greater our ability to decide what our thinking needs next.

Building and Rebuilding Understanding

The ability to see our thinking more clearly is just one step in the process. Our understanding of ideas, decisions, and problems often deepens when we return to them.

I use the term iterative reconstruction for this process. Each return provides another opportunity to notice what we missed, reconsider what we assumed, and connect ideas that were not visible on previous passes. Breaks and incubation become part of this process, allowing understanding to develop rather than forcing premature closure.

Over repeated reconstructions, we build a richer mental map, with more markers and connections that make deeper thinking possible.

Untapped Capacity

If people can learn to see their own thinking with greater resolution, the opportunity can extend beyond the individual.

Much of professional life is designed to reduce variability in judgment. But what if some of those differences are not noise that should be eliminated? Different people notice different signals, construct meaning differently, and approach the same problem from differing orientations.

I am interested in two related questions: How much better can individuals become at navigating their own thinking? And how much better can groups become at recognizing and drawing on the differences among the minds within them?

I refer to this concept of group thinking as a social immune system. Just as an immune system depends on diversity among receptors capable of detecting different threats, groups can benefit from differences in what their members notice, how they interpret what they see, and the mental models they bring to a problem. Those differences can expose blind spots that no individual mind alone could see.

My work has led me to believe we have considerably more cognitive capacity and collective intelligence available to us than our current systems know how to use.

Why This Matters Now

We have always relied on tools and borrowed thinking: procedures, best practices, technologies, and standardized methods that allow us to increase efficiency and benefit from thinking we did not construct ourselves. Some of that borrowing is useful and necessary.

The risk is that we can arrive at a conclusion without developing the mental map needed to understand how we got there or adapt when the context changes.

Artificial intelligence did not create this problem. It dramatically increases its scale.

As more of the cognitive journey can be supplied from outside the thinker, our ability to see, understand, and navigate our own thinking will matter more than ever.

Where the Work Is Going

My work continues to explore how people can become more perceptive about their own thinking and how groups can make better use of the differences among the minds within them.

The question that continues to drive the work is: How much improvement in human judgment becomes possible when people learn to perceive and work with their own thinking with greater resolution?

I believe we are leaving a substantial amount of cognitive capacity unused. I want to understand how much of it we can recover.