Introspection illusion
[2] In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behaviour (called "causal theories"[3]) or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
[5] Pronin describes the illusion as having four components: [I]ntrospection does not provide a direct pipeline to nonconscious mental processes.
Instead, it is best thought of as a process whereby people use the contents of consciousness to construct a personal narrative that may or may not correspond to their nonconscious states.
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.
[3] The causal theories provided after an action will often serve only to justify the person's behaviour in order to relieve cognitive dissonance.
[8] Although some other experimental work followed from the Nisbett and Wilson paper, difficulties with testing the hypothesis of introspective access meant that research on the topic generally stagnated.
[9] A ten-year-anniversary review of the paper raised several objections, questioning the idea of "process" they had used and arguing that unambiguous tests of introspective access are hard to achieve.
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.
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".
[16][page needed] Inspired by the Nisbett and Wilson paper, Petter Johansson and colleagues investigated subjects' insight into their own preferences using a new technique.
[17] The large proportion of subjects who were taken in by the deception contrasts with the 84% who, in post-test interviews, said that hypothetically they would have detected a switch if it had been made in front of them.
[18] 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.
[19] Another variation involved subjects choosing between two objects displayed on PowerPoint slides, then explaining their choice when the description of what they chose had been altered.
[20] Research by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel (relationship psychologist)[21] at Northwestern University also undermined the idea that subjects have direct introspective awareness of what attracts them to other people.
Men typically reported that physical attractiveness was crucial while women identified earning potential as most important.
[23] 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).
[24] 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.
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.
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.
The authors hypothesize that this attitude shift is the result of a combination of things: a desire to avoid feeling foolish for simply not knowing why one feels a certain way; a tendency to make justifications based upon cognitive reasons, despite the large influence of emotion; ignorance of mental biases (e.g., halo effects); and self-persuasion that the reasons one has come up with must be representative with their attitude.
In effect, people attempt to supply a "good story" to explain their reasoning, which often leads to convincing themselves that they actually hold a different belief.
These biologists argue that the evolution of argumentation was driven by the effectiveness of arguments on changing risk perception attitudes and life and death decisions to a more adaptive state, as "luxury functions" that did not enhance life and death survival would lose the evolutionary "tug of war" against the selection for nutritional thrift.
To do this, they made audio recordings of subjects who had been told to say whatever came into their heads as they decided whether their answer to a previous question might have been affected by bias.
When deciding whether others respond to social influence, subjects mainly looked at their behaviour, for example explaining other student's political opinions in terms of following the group.
[36] Psychologist Daniel Wegner has argued that an introspection illusion contributes to belief in paranormal phenomena such as psychokinesis.
Hence though subjects may feel that they directly introspect their own free will, the experience of control is actually inferred from relations between the thought and the action.
This theory, called "apparent mental causation", acknowledges the influence of David Hume's view of the mind.
