Tip of the Tongue & Feeling of Knowing

When we talk about what people know, it's often useful to also examine what people think they know.  It's like that great old quote about public opinion, spoken by Lucifer in an awful Victorian play entitled Prince Lucifer.  The bad old guy says:

Public opinion, is no more than this,
what people think other people think.

Truer words were never spoken, that is if you're into the social projection literature, pluralistic ignorance, false consensus, and all the rest.

But two areas often studied outside of public opinion and mass comm are feeling of knowing and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, but they're interesting nonetheless.  As this study abstract nicely puts it, tip-of-the-tongue is defined as "a recall failure accompanied by a strong feeling of imminent retrieval" while feeling of knowing is "a recall failure accompanied by a feeling of future ability to recognize the item."  In other words, TOT means you know you know it, but you just can't spit it out.  FOK is also a failure to recall something but you're sure you'll be able to do it later.

What's this to do with political knowledge, or media, or anything?

From a methodological standpoint, when we measure political knowledge of any kind (current events, textbook civics questions, etc.) we often get a lot of "don't know" responses which, I suspect, have some aspects of FOK and TOT.  Often surveys will probe further, trying to help someone retrieve the info from their head and get it out verbally for our survey.  The research into these phenomena, then, becomes vital in how we understand how people answer survey questions (which is a neat field all in itself).

The study I pointed to above gets into brain scans in different situations.  We rarely have the opportunity in political communication to that detailed, but it'd be fun to see what parts of the brain fire when asking political knowledge questions versus other kinds of questions.

I may get more into this later.

Metamemory

Stick meta in front of a word and we move a step back. It becomes thinking about that word, whatever it is. Too PhDweebish for ya? Here's an easy example. Put meta in front of cognition and metacognition is thinking about thinking. Metamemory, according to a study I read this morning, is belief in one's own memory efficiency -- kinda thinking about your memory.

Yeah, I'm getting older, so I wonder how long the old brainpan is gonna work.

This also gets into feeling of knowing. We've all suffered this one. Some call it the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Or maybe their different. Feeling of knowing is just what it sounds like: you know something, but you can't quite remember. It's like an annoying itch you can't quite reach. Tip-of-the-tongue is similar, a word or phrase or name that's right there, on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't quite grab it. There are probably conceptual and theoretical differences between the two, but it's too early, and I'm not caffeinated enough, to tease them out here.

Why am I going on about this? In part to demonstrate that there's a wide world of research out there on memory and the different ways it goes wrong, which can definitely play a role in how those of us who study political knowledge deal with survey respondents or experimental subjects. We know that TV news, for example, does a bit better with recognition of political information but not so well with recall of facts. There's a nagging feeling of knowing, a tip-of-the-tongue example for you right there. TV news alone probably leads to greater feelings that you know something, because of haphazard exposure to TV news while doing something else, thus leads to better recognition of information as opposed to easy recall. What might be interesting to study is any frustration that emerges from that nagging feeling that you know something but can't quite yank it out of trace memory because you watched it on the boob tube rather than read it online or on paper (thus, deeper processing).

Informed vs Feeling Informed

I've always been fascinated by the tension between being informed and feeling informed. In other words, lots of people think they're politically informed when, by most objective standards, they're not.

In psychology you'll find concepts like tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon or feeling of knowing. These are kinda cool but they don't really apply to political knowledge, except maybe in rare cases. They are often situations where you know an answer but can't quite dig it out of your brain and provide it (yeah, getting older here, see this more often).

Self efficacy or, from the political science folks, internal efficacy, do a better job of capturing what I mean. Broadly speaking, these have to do with a sense of competence. Do I feel adequate in keeping up with the complexities of public affairs and politics.

Most people say, yeah. But a lot don't.

Since 1948 there's been a slow, slight decline in how people answer whether politics is too complicated for them. About of third of U.S. voters now agree it's too complicated.

But I've never been happy with internal efficacy as a measure of perceived knowledge. Related concepts, but distinct. Or at least I think so. I've used internal efficacy in my own research as a surrogate of perceived knowledge, which to me is more particular, more specific, getting at an estimate of how much information one has about a candidate or campaign or the political world at large. Internal efficacy is broader, more about one's overall capacity to make sense of the world. I might have low perceived knowledge on something, but I could be damn confident in my efficacy at finding stuff out and becoming informed.

An Aside: yes, this is getting kinda PhDweebish and doesn't' have anything to do with McCain, Obama, or who they choose as vice presidents. Like everyone else I'm waiting to hear the news, though it almost never matters who the VP is in the long run.

OK, Hollander, but so what? If people feel informed, if they sense they are adequately informed, then they will be less likely to attend to the news, to the media, to new information. They're full. And certain media can create this sense of being full, kinda like empty calories from a soft drink, and not eat their veggies (i.e., news). That's the consequence: people will fill up on empty, funny, silly stuff and feel informed when, perhaps, they're not.