Metacognition
Overview
Metacognition is a higher-order cognitive function that monitors, evaluates, and controls your own cognitive activities (thinking, memory, learning, judgment, and so on). It's a concept that developmental psychologist John Flavell proposed in 1976. "Meta" means "beyond" in Greek, so it's cognition beyond cognition, in other words, the ability to "think about what you're thinking."
Metacognition has 2 sides: metacognitive knowledge (knowledge about your own cognitive traits) and metacognitive control (the ability to deliberately adjust your own cognitive processes). The first is self-understanding like "I can focus better in the morning," and the second is self-regulation like "My focus is slipping, so I'll take a break."
Running a question box and metacognition
In question box answers, the moment you notice your own emotional reaction is also a situation where metacognition comes into play. When you read a nasty question and get angry, a person whose metacognition is working can step back and observe: "I'm angry right now. If I answer in this state, I'll get emotional."
Metacognition also matters when you're reading the intent behind a question. It's the power to doubt your own process of interpretation: "Maybe I'm reading this question as malicious because of my own assumptions." This power is one of the things that shape the quality of your answers. Metacognition helps you notice confirmation bias.
Training metacognition
Metacognition has aspects that grow with practice. One simple method is writing. After you write a question box answer, look back and ask, "Why did I choose this answer?" and "Were there other ways I could have answered?" This habit of looking back is practice that trains metacognition.
Another way is rereading your answers after some time has passed. Emotional bias or leaps in logic you didn't notice right after writing become visible when you reread them the next day. This rereading is easy to put into practice even for people who find it hard to monitor themselves in the moment. The routine of saving a question box answer as a draft and posting it the next day also works as metacognition training.