In 1884, while trying to define the limits of human perception, Charles Pierce and Joseph Justrow discovered something else: the limits of our own insight. Participants in their experiment systematically underestimated their ability to correctly judge their own feelings.
Pierce and Justrow provided an explanation for “female insight and certain ‘telepathy’ phenomena.” Thankfully, these special meanings have been left behind (and the conceptual relationship between telepathy and female insight). But by the late 1970s, this method of asking participants to rate their performance has become its own research field: “metacognition” research.
