The Two Sides of Self-Reflection

Self-reflection has currently been going through a revival and is seen as a gateway to all things good and great. But beware the distinction between cognitive reflection, self-reflection, and rumination.

Self-reflection has been promoted as a means to increasing personal performance and constant improvement. Though some may associate this with the current wave of mindfulness, this has been in the leadership literature for a long time. In 1987 Gene Hall reported that reflective practices were more predictive of more effective School Principals, correlating with strategic sense and initiation, these descriptions relate to still current buzzwords in leadership literature.

Indeed, in the HBF model of the evolution of human behaviour, self-reflection can be considered one of the latest additions to our arsenal of cognitive skills. Self-reflection falls into the group of cognitive abilities that can be called mentalizing: broadly the ability to think about thinking and/or think about how others are thinking. And this is much more advanced than we may assume and a huge cognitive leap - it is therefore a particularly human ability. This ability is also the ability that should also enable us to improve competence and skills - by thinking and reflecting about these skills and how to improve them - and this is likely how it developed in human beings as a cognitive ability to improve abilities be that in fighting, strategising, gathering food, or making flint for hunting.

So, all in, it sounds like a good thing and good thing to promote in business and for individuals looking to get the best out of themselves. The only problem is that the research paints a muddled picture and I’d also like to focus on the downsides – so that we can get more of the upsides.

I started proposing reflection as a method for continuous improvement from the mid 1990s, more related to concepts of sports performance which are constantly analysing and reflecting on ways and methods of improvement. In 2005 the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) was developed by Fredericks (see box below). Research from this show promising results and show that cognitive reflection could be more instructive than general intelligence. We noted in an earlier article that those who scored higher on the test were less susceptible to falling into classic thinking fallacies and traps, and better able to deal with bias. In fact, there are a bunch of benefits to cognitive reflection. However, cognitive reflection is not the same as self-reflection because it is not just thinking about oneself but cognitively engaging with problem solving and self.

What is happening in the brain?