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The capacity for complex thought is one of the traits that distinguish us as humans. Although social psychologists have been concerned with thinking and thought processes from our earliest history (eg, Allport, 1924; James, 1890), the contemporary social cognition movement catapulted the importance of thought processes to center stage within the field (eg, Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Moscowitz, 2004). This thinking is sometimes very effortful and deliberate, and at other times it is more simple and automatic (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989; Kruglanski & Thompson, 1999; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Furthermore, our thinking is on occasion quite objective but at other times contaminated by various biases (see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Petty & Wegener, 1998, for reviews).

Although many distinctions such as those just noted can be made about thoughts, in this chapter we are concerned with a distinction between primary and secondary cognition. Primary thoughts involve our initial associations of some object with some attribute, or a projection of some object on some dimension of judgment such as “the flower is red” or “I like the flower”(McGuire & McGuire, 1991). Our thoughts can be directed at any object including other people, the environment, and ourselves. Following a primary thought, people can also generate other thoughts that occur at a second level, which involve reflections on the first-level thoughts (eg,“Is that flower really red or pink?” and” I am not sure how much I like that flower”). Metacognition refers to these second-order thoughts, or our thoughts about our thoughts or thought processes. Some authors have con-