Abstract: Addressing the pain points of traditional metacognitive training—high cognitive load, difficulty in sustained practice, and subjective evaluation susceptible to emotional and normative interference—this paper proposes the Mental Price Anchoring method. This approach uses individuals' high-frequency, small-denomination daily consumption as personalized anchors, employing "mental simulated payment" with dichotomous calibration of incremental satisfaction to achieve synergistic activation of System 1 (intuition) and System 2 (monitoring). Based on mental accounting theory, dual-system theory, and psychophysical laws, this paper demonstrates the academic validity of this paradigm: utilizing high-familiarity anchors to reduce cognitive load, stripping external interference through payment pain, and forcibly initiating metacognitive monitoring via dichotomous calibration. This method is zero-cost, universally applicable across cultures, and can be widely applied to content evaluation, emotional decision-making, workplace judgment, and other daily scenarios, representing an effective practical pathway for the popularization of metacognition.
Yichen SHEN (Wed,) studied this question.