Information Literacy Foundations

The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education highlights metacognition as crucial to engaging with information. And in fact, metacognition is highly important for learning in general. Metacognition means “thinking about thinking”—being aware of our own thought processes, and also our feelings and emotional responses. Reflecting, in other words.

Reflection is also a part of Gonzaga’s mission statement and a key component to Jesuit practices. When St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, created his famous “spiritual exercises,” he included a crucial step called the examen. Every evening he would bring to mind the experiences of the day, discerning what went well and what did not, and resolving to extend the successes and address the shortcomings the next day. Crucially, he didn’t just reflect on the events themselves, but also on the interior movements of his own soul associated with the events: his thoughts, feelings, dispositions, reactions, and so on, in order to discern whether those interior movements were helpful or not.

Following Ignatius’ footsteps, Jesuits still practice the examen, and reflection has become a integral component of Jesuit education. It is when we reflect on a topic of study and our own responses to it that we are able to discern its meaning and act upon it appropriately.

Applying this to the world of information, it is crucial to think about not only the information we are presented with, but also our own interior responses to it, in order to interact with that information effectively.

Why is it important to reflect on our own interior responses to information—on, in other words, our feelings about it?

To answer this, let’s shift our focus, from Ignatius of Loyola four hundred years ago, all the way up to the current cutting-edge realm of cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Vinod Goel noticed that he couldn’t explain human behavior, including his own, purely in terms of cognitive, or thought, processes. “Nothing I have learned [about thought] seems particularly relevant to explaining why I overindulge in chocolate cake and pizza,” he observes in his book, Reason and Less (xi). After all, the rational thing is to avoid overindulging. So why would a rational creature do an irrational thing?

The answer, Goel writes, is that human behavior is not a matter of rational thought alone. Instead, humans have four types of "minds" working simultaneously:

• The Autonomic Mind: This is your automatic pilot that manages essential survival functions like breathing, heart rate, and body temperature to keep your internal environment stable (homeostasis).

• The Instinctive Mind: This is your primal urge system that guides basic, innate, and highly motivating behaviors essential for survival and social life, like the fight-or-flight response, sexual desire, and in-group/out-group biases.

• The Associative Mind: This is your habit and learning mind that fine-tunes your behavior throughout your life by linking events together and repeating actions that result in rewards or avoiding actions that lead to punishment.

• The Reasoning Mind: This is your logical, planning mind that allows for abstract thought, complex decision-making, and generating new strategies by using beliefs and desires and demanding logical consistency between them.

Feelings (such pleasure, disgust, fear, or desire) act as the common language or "currency" that allows these four different systems to communicate and integrate with each other to produce a single action. Consequential human behavior is rarely the result of a single mind; it's a blended response of all four working simultaneously, sending and receiving feelings to communicate their goals.

So to go back to Dr. Goel’s question about why he overindulges in chocolate cake:

Dr. Goel knows logically (with his Reasoning Mind) that he doesn’t want to be overweight and so shouldn't eat the chocolate cake. But the sight and smell of the cake activate ancient, powerful Instinctive (hunger, desire) and Associative (past associations of the action of biting into a moist, rich piece of cake with the pleasure that follows) systems. These systems generate intense feelings of desire and compulsion. On top of this, he’s feeling unhappy today because he has a bit of a cold (Autonomic system), which further shifts his behavior away from his long-term, abstract rational goal and towards the immediate compulsion. He eats the cake.

The key insight is that we don't just act based on what makes the most logical sense. We act based on a constant blend of our logical brain, our gut feelings, our learned habits, and our basic survival functions.

While reason is a part of the process, it's often not the boss! Automatic body processes, primal instincts, and learned associations all heavily influence our choices, which is why people do things they know are bad for them, like eating junk food, or procrastinating. The rational mind is tethered to and often outvoted by older biological systems.

So how do we ensure that reason is the boss? How do we make sure that our actions are derived from careful, logical choices, and not arational instincts? The answer is to be self-reflective: to bring our awareness to our internal responses, our feelings, to understand what those feelings are telling us about the origins of our thought and behavior, and to intentionally integrate them with our conscious, rational goals.

But wait, what does all this have to do with information?

Simple: we usually have feelings about the information we are engaging with. When we are looking at an article, for example, we might feel positively about a it, and think it is valuable and important information (and maybe then share it around to our social media circles). Or we might feel uneasy about it, and move on quickly. Or we might feel negatively about it, and look for reasons it can't be true.

Those reactions might be valid. But often, those reactions don't come from the careful, rational, cognitive system, but from one of our other systems taking charge.

This is where cognitive biases come from, such as:

                     Interoceptive bias (aka "hungry judge effect")

  In-Group Bias (aka tribalism)

Confirmation Bias

(Which of the four "minds" do you think each of these cognitive biases is using?)

Being self-reflective helps us to avoid biases like these. If we are aware of what we are feeling, we have the chance to make a conscious judgement about whether our feelings are appropriate.

The fact is, information is a two-way street. Whenever we are faced with information, we interact with it. We don’t just judge information dispassionately in a vacuum. We always bring something of ourselves to the table, whether we are consciously aware of that or not.

One of the things we bring to the table is our own preexisting beliefs and values: our worldview.

A worldview is the comprehensive set of presuppositions, beliefs, and values that we each hold about the fundamental nature of reality, and that provides a framework for how we interpret and interact with the world. Everything that goes into making us who we are—like our parents, peers, religion or lack of religion, the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve watched, and especially the choices we’ve made throughout our lives—gives us a particular lens through which we view reality.

When we encounter information, our worldview acts as a filter and a powerful source of emotional response. Information that aligns with our established beliefs—political, religious, scientific, personal, etc.—often triggers feelings of comfort, validation, and agreement. This positive emotional resonance can make the information seem more credible, regardless of its actual evidence or source quality. Conversely, information that strongly challenges our core values can immediately spark feelings of alarm, discomfort, defensiveness, or even outright disgust. This negative emotional reaction can lead us to dismiss the information as false or biased, even before we’ve applied rigorous intellectual scrutiny.

The challenge lies in the speed and intensity of these feelings. Our internal responses are often quicker than our reasoned judgment, essentially giving the initial emotional gut-check the first and most powerful vote on the information's credibility. This is a survival mechanism, a way for the brain to quickly categorize the world, but it’s precisely where we become most vulnerable to cognitive biases.

So when a piece of information comes in that gives us a strong feeling, whether of attraction/agreement or disgust/disagreement, we should stop and consider why we are feeling that way. Is it because of the accuracy of the information? Or is it because of how well it fits with our prior worldview?

We might not be wrong in our judgement about the information! We don’t necessarily have to change our minds. But if we’re not self-aware of our own thoughts and feelings, if we’re not metacognitive, if we’re not reflective, then we run the risk of being manipulated by bad information and by our own internal responses to it.