People constantly need to select which information to attend to and how many cognitive resources to allocate for the processing of this information. This experiment (N = 510) examines how individuals’ meta-knowledge (i.e., the self-perception of one’s issue knowledge) influences this selective exposure to and selective elaboration of related information for the case of climate change. We therefore manipulate participants’ meta-knowledge by providing fake feedback in a climate change knowledge test. Integrating literature from different disciplines, we derive competing hypotheses on how this relationship might look like with meta-knowledge either increasing or decreasing selective exposure (H1a, H1b) and selective elaboration (H2a, H2b). We further propose climate change self-schema as a possible mediating factor (H3) and investigate effects of meta-knowledge on related behaviors (H4). Our data did not support any direction of hypotheses 1 and 2 since we did not find significant group differences in neither selective exposure nor elaboration. However, (pre-registered) correlational analyses on the relationship between self-rated subjective knowledge and selective exposure and elaboration speak for a positive relationship, r_{SelectiveExposure} = 0.17, p < .001, r_{SelectiveElaboration} = 0.33, p < .001. This could be explained through climate change self-schemas which differed significantly between the two conditions (t(507.47) = 2.92, p = .004, d = 0.26) and correlated positively with selective exposure (r = 0.36, p < .001) and elaboration (r = 0.28, p < .001). These results give new insights into how people might actively manage their cognitive resources through metacognitive monitoring.