Mistaken
Introspections
Let’s pause to take stock.
Introspections are certainly a valuable source of information, and for some
purposes they are the only form of inquiry open to us. At the same time, there
are limits on what we can learn from introspection. Some of the limits involve
the communication of
introspections—that is, difficulties in translating introspections intowords.
Other limits arise because much of our mental life takes place outside of our
awareness, so that introspections are almost invariably incomplete as a source of information about our thoughts and
beliefs.
Worse, our introspections are
sometimes wrong—they systematically
misrepresent our thoughts. This situation is evident in the electric shock
experiment just described: Participants who took the pain pill in that study
confidently reported that they weren’t influenced by the pill, but the data say
they were. Clearly, then, these
participants didn’t know what was going on in their own minds.
Related cases, also involving
mistaken introspections, are easy to find. In one experiment (Nisbett &
Wilson, 1977), shoppers announced that they preferred one nightgown over
another because of the feel of the fabric. However, we know this self-report is
mistaken because the nightgowns being compared in this study all had the same
fabric! Moreover, the study’s data tell us that the participants showed a
strong preference for the nightgown that was in the rightmost position when the
options were presented. But, if researchers asked the participants directly
whether they were influenced by the positioning of their choices, they
steadfastly insisted they were not. Hence, the participants were not influenced by the factor (fabric)
they mentioned in their self-reports; but they were influenced by a factor (position) that they denied.
How should we think about this
pattern? How could people be certain about the source of their own actions—and
be wrong? One proposal is that the
knowledge we each have about ourselves is in many cases the result of an
after-the-fact reconstruction, created just moments after we acted in a certain
way (or moments after we made a choice or reached a conclusion; Nisbett &
Wilson, 1977). In other words, we might think we’re recalling why we acted as
we did just a few seconds ago; but instead we’re (unconsciously) reasoning this
way: “I know I did X. I believe that, in general, people do X because of Y.
Therefore, I bet I did X because of Y.” This process often leads us to cor-rect
conclusions because, in many cases, we have sensible beliefs about why people
do what they do. Sometimes, though, we have an incomplete or inaccurate
understanding of why people act in a certain way. In such cases, our
reconstruction will lead us to the wrong conclusion. In this way, our
self-understanding may be limited—even when we feel quite certain that we know
the sources of our own feelings and behaviors.
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