Introspection illusion

The phrase "introspection illusion" was coined by Emily Pronin. Pronin describes the illusion as having four components: • People give a strong weighting to introspective evidence when assessing themselves. • They do not give such a strong weight when assessing others. • People disregard their own behaviour when assessing themselves (but not others). • Own introspections are more highly weighted than others. It is not just that people lack access to each other's introspections: they regard only their own as reliable. ==Unreliability of introspection==

The idea that people can be mistaken about their inner functioning is one applied by eliminative materialists. These philosophers suggest that some concepts, including "belief" or "pain", will turn out to be quite different from what is commonly expected as science advances. The faulty guesses that people make to explain their thought processes have been called "causal theories". They distinguished between mental contents (such as feelings) and mental processes, arguing that while introspection gives us access to contents, processes remain hidden. Updating the theory in 2002, Wilson admitted that the 1977 claims had been too far-reaching. However, rather than acknowledge their lack of insight, they confabulate a plausible explanation, and "seem" to be "unaware of their unawareness". A study conducted by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt was set up to measure the extent of introspective accuracy by gathering introspective reports from a single individual who was given the pseudonym "Melanie". Melanie was given a beeper which sounded at random moments, and when it did she had to note what she was currently feeling and thinking. After analyzing the reports the authors had mixed views about the results, the correct interpretation of Melanie's claims and her introspective accuracy. Even after long discussion the two authors disagreed with each other in the closing remarks, Schwitzgebel being pessimistic and Hurlburt optimistic about the reliability of introspection. Factors in accuracy Nisbett and Wilson conjectured about several factors that they found to contribute to the accuracy of introspective self-reports on cognition. • Knowledge of prior idiosyncratic reactions to a stimulus: An individual's belief that they react in an abnormal manner to a stimulus, which would be unpredictable from the standpoint of an outside observer, seems to support true introspective ability. However, these perceived covariations may actually be false, and truly abnormal covariations are rare. • Differences in causal theories between subcultures: The inherent differences between discrete subcultures necessitates that they have some differing causal theories for any one stimulus. Thus, an outsider would not have the same ability to discern a true cause as would an insider, again making it seem to the introspector that they have the capacity to understand the judgment process better than can another. • Attentional and intentional knowledge: An individual may consciously know that they were not paying attention to a certain stimulus or did not have a certain intent. Again, as insight that an outside observer does not have, this seems indicative of true introspective ability. However, the authors note that such knowledge can actually mislead the individual in the case that it is not as influential as they may think. • Inadequate feedback: By nature, introspection is difficult to disconfirm in everyday life, where there are no tests of it and others tend not to question one's introspections. Moreover, when a person's causal theory of reasoning is seemingly disconfirmed, it is easy for them to produce alternative reasons for why the evidence is actually not disconfirmatory at all. • Motivational reasons: Considering one's own ability to understand their reasoning as being equivalent to an outsider's is intimidating and a threat to the ego and sense of control. Thus, people do not like to entertain the idea, instead maintaining the belief that they can accurately introspect. Criticisms Some evolutionary biologists criticize the claim that confabulation of justifications evolved to relieve cognitive dissonance because it assumes the evolution of a mechanism for feeling dissonance by a lack of justification. These evolutionary biologists argue that if causal theories had no higher predictive accuracy than prejudices that would have been in place even without causal theories, there would be no evolutionary selection for experiencing any form of discomfort from lack of causal theories. The similar claim that the apparent link between homophobia and homosexuality found in the U.S. can be explained by an actual link between homophobia and homosexuality is criticized by many scholars. Since much homophobia in the United States is due to religious indoctrination and therefore unrelated to personal sexual preferences, they argue that the appearance of a link is due to volunteer-biased erotica research in which religious homophobes fear God's judgment but not being recorded as "homosexual" by Earthly psychologists while most non-homophobes are misled by false dichotomies to assume that the notion that men can be sexually fluid is somehow "homophobic" and "unethical". ==Choice blindness==

Inspired by the Nisbett and Wilson paper, Petter Johansson and colleagues investigated subjects' insight into their own preferences using a new technique. Subjects saw two photographs of people and were asked which they found more attractive. They were given a closer look at their "chosen" photograph and asked to verbally explain their choice. However, in some trials, the experimenter had slipped them the other photograph rather than the one they had chosen, using sleight of hand. A majority of subjects failed to notice that the picture they were looking at did not match the one they had chosen just seconds before. Many subjects confabulated explanations of their preference. For example, a man might say "I preferred this one because I prefer blondes" when he had in fact pointed to the dark-haired woman, but had been handed a blonde. These must have been confabulated because they explain a choice that was never made. A follow-up experiment involved shoppers in a supermarket tasting two different kinds of jam, then verbally explaining their preferred choice while taking further spoonfuls from the "chosen" pot. However, the pots were rigged so that, when explaining their choice, the subjects were tasting the jam they had actually rejected. A similar experiment was conducted with tea. at Northwestern University also undermined the idea that subjects have direct introspective awareness of what attracts them to other people. These researchers examined male and female subjects' reports of what they found attractive. Men typically reported that physical attractiveness was crucial while women identified earning potential as most important. These subjective reports did not predict their actual choices in a speed dating context, or their dating behaviour in a one-month follow-up. Consistent with choice blindness, Henkel and Mather found that people are easily convinced by false reminders that they chose different options than they actually chose and that they show greater choice-supportive bias in memory for whichever option they believe they chose. Research by Kamyab Ghorbanpour and Michal Klincewicz at Tilburg University employed an immersive adventure video game to investigate Choice Blindness. Their study demonstrated that virtual environments can be used to induce and measure this phenomenon. The findings indicated that women were more likely than men to detect manipulations of their choices. The research also suggested that individual personality traits and values influence the likelihood of being affected by the choice blindness effect. Criticisms It is not clear, however, the extent to which these findings apply to real-life experience when we have more time to reflect or use actual faces (as opposed to gray-scale photos). As Prof. Kaszniak points out: "although a priori theories are an important component of people's causal explanations, they are not the sole influence, as originally hypothesized by Nisbett & Wilson. Actors also have privileged information access that includes some degree of introspective access to pertinent causal stimuli and thought processes, as well as better access (than observers) to stimulus-response covariation data about their own behaviour". Other criticisms point out that people who volunteer to psychology lab studies are not representative of the general population and also are behaving in ways that do not reflect how they would behave in real life. Examples include people of many different non-open political ideologies, despite their enmity to each other, having a shared belief that it is "ethical" to give an appearance of humans justifying beliefs and "unethical" to admit that humans are open-minded in the absence of threats that inhibit critical thinking, making them fake justifications. ==Attitude change==

Studies that ask participants to introspect upon their reasoning (for liking, choosing, or believing something, etc.) tend to see a subsequent decrease in correspondence between attitude and behaviour in the participants. For example, in a study by Wilson et al., participants rated their interest in puzzles that they had been given. Prior to rating, one group had been instructed to contemplate and write down their reasons for liking or disliking the puzzles, while the control group was given no such task. The amount of time participants spent playing with each puzzle was then recorded. The correlation between ratings of and time spent playing each puzzle was much smaller for the introspection group than the control group. A subsequent study was performed to show the generalizability of these results to more "realistic" circumstances. In this study, participants were all involved in a steady romantic relationship. All were asked to rate how well-adjusted their relationship was. One group was beforehand asked to list all of the reasons behind their feelings for their partner, while the control group did not do so. Six months later, the experimenters followed up with participants to check if they were still in the same relationship. Those who had been asked to introspect showed much less attitude-behaviour consistency based upon correlations between earlier relationship ratings and whether they were still dating their partners. This shows that introspection was not predictive, but this also probably means that the introspection has changed the evolution of the relationship. Introspection by focusing on feelings In contrast with introspection by focusing on reasoning, that which instructs one to focus on their feelings has actually been shown to increase attitude-behaviour correlations. ==A priori causal theories==

In their classic paper, Nisbett and Wilson proposed that introspective confabulations result from a priori theories, of which they put forth four possible origins: • Explicit cultural rules (e.g., stopping at red traffic lights) • Implicit cultural theories, with certain schemata for likely stimulus-response relationships (e.g., an athlete only endorses a brand because he is paid to do so) • Individual observational experiences that lead one to form a theory of covariation (e.g. "I feel nervous. I always get nervous when I have to talk at meetings!") • Similar connotation between stimulus and response The authors note that the use of these theories does not necessarily lead to inaccurate assumptions, but that this frequently occurs because the theories are improperly applied. ==Explaining biases==

Pronin argues that over-reliance on intentions is a factor in a number of different biases. For example, by focusing on their current good intentions, people can overestimate their likelihood of behaving virtuously. In perceptions of bias The bias blind spot is an established phenomenon that people rate themselves as less susceptible to bias than their peer group. Emily Pronin and Matthew Kugler argue that this phenomenon is due to the introspection illusion. Pronin and Kugler's interpretation is that when people decide whether someone else is biased, they use overt behaviour. On the other hand, when assessing whether or not they themselves are biased, people look inward, searching their own thoughts and feelings for biased motives. Since biases operate unconsciously, these introspections are not informative, but people wrongly treat them as reliable indication that they themselves, unlike other people, are immune to bias. They displayed standard biases, for example rating themselves above the others on desirable qualities (demonstrating illusory superiority). The experimenters explained cognitive bias, and asked the subjects how it might have affected their judgment. The subjects rated themselves as less susceptible to bias than others in the experiment (confirming the bias blind spot). When they had to explain their judgments, they used different strategies for assessing their own and others' bias. In perceptions of control and free will Psychologist Daniel Wegner proposed that the felt experience of willing an action is often inferred rather than directly introspected. Because intentions typically precede matching outcomes, people infer authorship when a thought is prior, consistent with the outcome, and not obviously overridden by other causes; when those cues mislead, an illusion of control can arise. Wegner termed this process “apparent mental causation,” and experiments using visualization and other “magical thinking” setups have induced such feelings of influence even without causal power. Attribution asymmetries If agency judgments draw on privileged access to one’s own intentions, people may attribute more free will to themselves than to others. Across four studies, participants rated their own actions as less predictable, their futures as having more possibilities, and their desires/intentions as more causally potent than those of peers or coworkers, consistent with a self–other asymmetry in perceived control. Criticism and qualifications Critiques and qualifications note that introspective access is not uniformly poor. Under methodologically constrained conditions, verbal reports can provide valid information about cognitive processes, and people can estimate aspects of their own processing (e.g., response timing) with useful accuracy; training such as mindfulness has also been reported to improve certain measures of introspective accuracy. == Debiasing and training ==

An educational intervention describing unconscious biases has been reported to reduce the bias blind spot in self-ratings relative to a control group. Findings on correction are mixed across studies; Pronin argues that warnings alone show little effect, whereas interventions that explain the bias and emphasize its unconscious operation are more likely to yield corrections. Separately, Wilson suggests that attending to one’s observable behavior rather than introspecting putative causes may improve self-knowledge, although this is not a direct debiasing test of the introspection illusion. Others contend that, with appropriate methods, verbal reports can be valid data about cognitive processes, which qualifies strong claims about the unreliability of introspection. ==See also==