Professor Lisa Son on Unlearning Failures through Metacognition

Lisa Son is a Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University and 2023 Shinhan Visiting Professor at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. She received a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University.

Q: Tell us about your academic background.

A: I’m Lisa, and I’m a Korean American born in Los Angeles but grew up mostly in a little town in New Jersey. I was a Psychology major at the University of Pennsylvania. I grew up loving psychology and I already knew different aspects of psychology. As a minority, I directed my interest to cultural psychology. I liked linguistics. I was interested in the brain—I was interested in people experiencing mental health challenges. We all have our little illnesses and anxieties, so I was interested in human behavior.

I also worked as a work-study student in a neuroscience lab—I did the surgeries for the intracranial tubes, gave the anesthesia, and handled rats really well. For all four years at Penn, I became really close with [the late] Robert Rescorla who was famous for the Rescorla-Wagner model on learning in animals—particularly in relation to reinforcement schedules. I learned so much from him, but I still didn’t know what research was.

Q: Why did you decide to pursue an academic career and how did you become interested in metacognition?

When I was at Penn, I was having fun doing these surgeries and didn’t really think about the future. I was a pre-med, but I didn’t think about taking my MCATs to go to medical school. My grades were okay, but medical school was too expensive. When somebody told me about the loan forgiveness policy for Ph.D. holders, I decided to take my GREs. I applied for graduate schools, and eventually began studying as a Ph.D. student in Psychology at Columbia.

Originally, I was accepted by an animal researcher, but I didn’t want to work with rats, so I started working with a chimp researcher. As soon as I got there, I met Professor of Psychology Janet Metcalfe—my advisor—who had just arrived. She and Arthur Shimomura had co-edited a book called Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing. When I visited Columbia as a college senior, Arthur gave me that book and said, “If you want to do human research, try reading this book because Janet Metcalf is coming to Columbia at the same time you are.” It was the spring of my senior year when I started reading it, and it was everything.

Q: Can you share with us some applicable key findings from your metacognition research?

A: Metacognition, as said in the preview of [Metcalfe and Shimomura’s] book, is about knowing thyself. In two parts, metacognition is that you first have to monitor what you know about yourself to use it to control subsequent behavior. For example, if I’m sitting in class and I don’t understand what the teacher is saying, I just monitor. Then, I’d raise my hand and tell the teacher I don’t understand this. That’s control. Slowly, I started to understand that both the monitoring and the control components are very difficult for different reasons. Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know—that’s one of the biggest problems in metacognition. And there’s something called overconfidence. All of these, over- or under- confidence is a breakdown in monitoring. 

At first, when I learned about metacognition, I was really sad because I felt I didn’t know myself in the way that I thought the majority of people did. Being a minority was a big thing in my life, when I was not saying what I thought, not saying things out loud, and just being that obedient, quiet student. I certainly never raised my hand in classes. Even in graduate school, I was very quiet. And I loved this word “metacognition” and the concept that you must know yourself.

In the beginning of my research, I focused on monitoring and control—how accurate we are, and when and why overconfidence occurs. One experiment I did early on with a colleague was featured on a KBS show while I was researching in Korea as a Fulbright US scholar. We replicated the experiment with high school students at Haneul Academy. The research showed that, for example, in the learning context, self-testing is more beneficial for long-term learning whereas for self-reading, you have the illusion that you’re doing great and just become overconfident.

Q: You have published two books. How did you shift to being a book author?

A: After that KBS special, people started contacting me, saying, “Can you write a book on this?” Obviously, I said “No, I don’t write books.” I certainly didn’t put myself out there. I just did my research quietly and wrote papers. However, in Korea, I saw a lot more under-confidence during learning than overconfidence that I had seen in America. During my sabbatical here, I decided to write my first book [in Korean] on metacognition, which came out right at the peak of COVID. Many Korean parents read it because they wanted to know how to help their children learn how to learn. I was very happy because people started to realize that it’s not about forcing ourselves to remember information and more about making errors. 

My second book “Impostor” came out [in Korean] at the beginning of 2022. For the record, I’m not a writer and certainly not fluent in Korean. This was a difficult task for me, but at the same time, I was using metacognition to reach a goal with many previous failures. Even writing one page involved failure, and I had to keep editing and get a lot of help from others. The reason I wrote “Impostor” so quickly was that after I wrote “Metacognition,” everybody assumed that I had great metacognition, which is not true. I’m still learning it and trying to improve myself. Like many other people, I have to hide my weaknesses, my failures, and I pretend to be happy and perfect, and smart and cool with everything.

Q: How did you become a UIC Shinhan Visiting Professor?

A: I’ve always wanted to teach—even if it’s a sabbatical when I have to do a lot of research. 

The Fulbright office is in Mapo district, and I’ve taught in different places that were very far away, so this time I wanted to teach somewhere close by. I had a friend of a friend who works at Yonsei. When this position came through, I was so happy. I learned that UIC is a college that offers English-speaking programs—which is more comfortable for me. 

I also wanted a smaller section, where I envisioned getting more Korean students to talk and engage in a real-time discussion. When I prepared my syllabus, I called my seminar “Metacognitive Bias” and focused on the two biases that I did most of my research on—hindsight bias and impostor phenomenon.

Q: How has your experience been teaching the “Shinhan Seminar” at Yonsei UIC? 

A: I wanted to go through metacognitive bias in my seminar. On the first day, I realized that there were no psychology majors in my class—they didn’t know certain basics of the brain. So I was like, “Oh, I have to do a fast review,”—I did a review of psychology and cognitive psychology before getting to metacognition.

It’s the teaching that I love. The students were wonderful. I made them write a little paper because I couldn’t really get the sense of how strong their English was. Their writing pieces turned out to be really creative and honest. Their English was perfect. It showed me they were curious and open. 

While teaching and research has been so important in my life, as I get older and meet more students, it’s really about mentoring. Students are a lot like us when we were young. We have all the stressors, but they have more stressors. It’s a different world—we can’t help them in many ways. What’s so great about metacognition because it’s not only about giving them the solution but also about helping them think of the solution. It’s the journey—whatever the solution is, just give them the tools to know how to be flexible.

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Interviewed by Professor Howard Kahm

Edited by Pho Vu (IID, '20.5)