Why “Thinking Aloud” About Your Thinking Makes a Difference

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Thinking aloud during a think-aloud protocol typically involves verbalizing what's going through your mind while engaging in any given task or playing sports.

During qualitative "Think Aloud" (TA) research, study participants are asked to say whatever comes to mind about what they're doing, thinking, and feeling as a way to gain insights into someone's metacognitive processes.

Different think-aloud protocols involve thinking about one's thinking via "concurrent verbalizations" in slightly different ways. For example, a Level 3 think-aloud protocol (Ericsson & Simon, 1993) involves filtering and guiding one's mental activity before verbalizing thoughts. On the flip side, Level 1 and 2 think-aloud protocols involve more direct and immediate articulation of what's going through one's mind without additional processing.

Research into the psychological impact of thinking aloud can be traced back to the late 1800s and Wilhelm Wundt's "Selbstbeobachtung" (1888) technique of self-observation and introspection. During his groundbreaking metacognitive experiments, Wundt instructed participants to look inward and pay close attention to their inner thought processes while verbalizing their "flow of consciousness" in spoken words.

In the 1980s, Anders Ericsson and Herbert Simon advanced "Think Aloud" research in a seminal paper (Ericsson & Simon, 1980) that concluded: "Verbalizing information is shown to affect cognitive processes only if the instructions require verbalization of information that would not otherwise be attended to."

In recent months, new Think Aloud research has shed light on how athletes cope with stressors (McGreary et al., 2020), how TA can play a role in the resolution of desire-goal conflicts (Gunn & Taylor, 2020), and how educating athletes about meta-attention also teaches them to concentrate (Oliver et al., 2020).

Interestingly, the latest paper by Alex Oliver, "Teaching Athletes to Understand Their Attention Is Teaching Them to Concentrate," suggests that encouraging an athlete to verbalize what's going through his or her mind using TA Level 3 promotes metacognition and meta-attention in ways that may improve concentration. As the authors explain:

"Concentration, focusing on the most relevant information for further processing, is regarded as a prerequisite for successful sporting performance. Athletes must possess awareness, knowledge, and controllability of their attention to concentrate effectively. One way to develop this awareness, knowledge, and controllability of attention is through the mechanism of meta-attention—thinking about, knowing about, and controlling attention."

Previous research (Whitehead et al., 2016) found that elite-level golfers tend to think aloud more during high-pressure situations; these findings suggest that TA vocalizations may offset an athlete's odds of choking when the stakes are high. As Amy Whitehead and coauthors explain:

"When performing under competitive pressure, it was found that higher-skilled golfers were more likely to verbalize technical rules compared to practice conditions, especially during putting performance. From a practical perspective, Talking Aloud can aid a player, coach, or sport psychologist by allowing thought processes to be identified and investigate a performer's thoughts when faced with the pressure of competition."

Another recent study (Stephenson et al., 2020) by Whitehead and colleagues showed how think-aloud protocols are a reflective practicing tool that "can help an athlete move between analyzing his own performance as if suspended above himself and engaging in the action."

Anecdotally, as a retired ultra-endurance athlete and Guinness World Record holder, I know that thinking aloud helped me take a "fly on the wall" approach to observing my own athletic performance while simultaneously making it easier to "think about my thinking" via metacognitive processes. Notably, the self-talk strategies that work best for me (and lots of other people) generally involve using non-first-person pronouns and thinking aloud in the third person (Kross et al., 2014).

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In addition to improving concentration, thinking aloud can also facilitate self-distancing, which has been shown (Grossman et al., 2016) to increase heart rate variability, calm the nervous system, boost executive functioning, and improve wise reasoning. (See "Self-Talk Using Third-Person Pronouns Hacks Your Vagus Nerve.")