Illusion of introspection: what is it and how is this cognitive bias expressed?
The illusion of introspection affects how we perceive our own mental activity.
Many biases influence the way we see and process the world. Whether they are visual illusions, auditory illusions, social phenomena or otherwise, our way of grasping the world is not free from manipulation.
But it is not only our way of receiving information from the outside world that can be biased, but also our way of retrieving information from our mind, our self-knowledge, our introspection.
The illusion of introspection is a psychological phenomenon studied by the sciences of free will, which basically means that we cannot even trust the mental states that we attribute to ourselves as being behind our decisions.
What is the illusion of introspection?
The illusion of introspection is an expression coined by Emily Pronin which refers to the cognitive bias that causes people to mistakenly think that we have a direct view of the origin of our mental states and our present behavior.. That is, this illusion is the strong feeling we have when we believe that we can access the underlying processes of our mental states without any alteration, despite the fact that most mental processes are inaccessible to purely conscious interpretation.
According to scholars of this phenomenon, the illusion of introspection causes people to make complex explanations about our own behavior based on causal theories, i.e., if we have behaved in a certain way it is because we have thought in a particular way. We attribute a whole mental process that will ultimately result in a particular behavior, despite the fact that what actually happens between thought and behavior may be too complex to establish a clear and unidirectional cause-effect relationship.
This bias demonstrates that people cannot even be sure that we believe in what we think has led us to behave in a certain way. Many experiments have suggested that our philosophical idea of "introspection", far from being a process that leads us to direct access to the thoughts, motives or decisions that lead us to perform a behavior, is actually a process of construction and inference. People not only infer the thoughts of others based on their behavior, but we infer our own as well..
One of the consequences of the illusion of introspection is to think that people are totally free to decide about our own behavior and that it is rationally grounded. We infer our own mental states, believing it to be introspection and mistaking as self-knowledge a mere inference made a posteriori. In addition, we tend to think that others do get confused and tend to be more biased and conformist.
Scientific investigation of this phenomenon
Many investigations have scientifically addressed the illusion of introspection. We could mention a whole list of experiments in which different components attributed to this bias have been addressed, such as precision factors, ignorance of error, choice blindness, change blindness, attitude changes, feeling-centered introspection...
Photograph experiment
Among the most interesting investigations we can find the one carried out by Petter Johansson's group in 2005. This study has been very revealing in showing how biases influence even how biases influence even when it comes to attributing mental states to usThis study has been very revealing in showing how biases influence even when attributing mental states to ourselves, confabulating and inferring mental processes that in reality have never occurred because the final behavior was not originally intended to be carried out.
Their main study consisted of a sample of 120 participants who were presented with two photographs with a different woman's face in each. Participants were asked to choose one of these two photographs, the one they found most attractive or the one they liked best.The participants were asked to choose one of these two photographs, the one they found most attractive or the one they liked best. Some participants were asked to choose, but once they did, the researchers did something very interesting: they changed the photo. When the volunteer chose a photo, the researcher would do a trick and show them the other one, keeping the one they had chosen.
After that, the participants were given some time to think about why they had made their choice. Some were given only 2 seconds, some were given 5 seconds, and some were given a long time. The group that was given an indefinite time to think about their response was the least aware of what their actual choice had been, as only 27% of the participants in that condition noticed the change. The rest were convinced that they had chosen the picture that the experimenter had actually chosen.
After this, the participants were asked to give their explanation of why they had "chosen" that photograph, asking them the reason for their preference. We might think that there should be significant differences between the participants who did not have their picture changed and were not cheated and those who were, since the latter group was asked to give an explanation for something they had not actually decided and, therefore, there should be no memory that they had made that decision.
But the curious thing is that they did give an explanation, and a very well-founded one.. In his study Johansson analyzed the explanations of all participants in terms of three dimensions: emotionality, specificity and certainty. Without going into too much detail about the experiment, it was found that the subjects who had had their picture changed and thus had been manipulated gave explanations with the same confidence, level of detail and emotionality as those who had not had their picture changed.
At the end of the experiment, the deceived participants were asked a final question: whether they believed that, if they had participated in a study in which the photograph they had chosen had been changed without warning, they would really notice the change. Surprising and even comical as it may seem, the vast majority (84%) said they firmly believed that they would easily detect the change, even though they themselves had just been victims of the deception.
The researchers themselves comment that this phenomenon is also connected to the phenomenon of change blindnessand that it is closely related to a phenomenon that the authors of this study call choice blindness. Participants may have noticed the change during the first few seconds after the switch, but as the minutes passed, they became blind to the decision they had actually made, making more sense in their minds of the idea that they had actually chosen the photograph with which they were being tricked.
Marmalade experiment
The experiment with the photographs was quite revealing, but it had the limitation that since they showed women's faces, many participants thought they were the same or did not pay attention to the details, so perhaps some did not notice the change. For this type the same Johansson's group made use of another experiment involving another experiment in which another sensory pathway was involved: taste..
These same researchers went to a supermarket and set up a stand where they gave visitors a taste of two types of jams. Once their innocent experimental subject had chosen which jar he wanted to taste from, he was given a first sample, then a second, and finally he was asked to explain the reasons why he preferred that particular jam.
However, there was a catch. In each jar of jam there were two compartments with different jams whose flavors could be very different. Although the customer saw that they were given the second sample from the same jar they had chosen, they were actually given a different jam than the one they had tasted first. Despite having different tastes, less than a third of the participants detected the change..
Introspection and confabulation
Looking at these two curious experiments, which are along the same lines as many others carried out in the field of cognitive science, we can affirm that the final result or behavior influences the way in which we explain its occurrence. That is to say, we attribute to it a mental processing that may not have occurred and we focus more on what the end result is rather than remembering what actually happened..
Confabulation has been a curse word in the history of psychology. To confabulate is to invent stories, filling in the gaps in our memory, something traditionally associated as a symptom and strategy of people suffering from some kind of disease, disorder or syndrome that impairs the storage of memories, such as Korsakoff's syndrome, various dementias or schizophrenia.
The scientific approach to the illusion of introspection, with the experiments of Johansson, Pronin and many other researchers, has shown that confabulation is an act of a healthy mind and that it occurs when trying to retrieve mental states that we attribute as participants in our decision making and, consequently, our behavior. The participants in Johansson's two experiments confabulate and are healthy, inventing stories a posteriori to explain decisions they have not actually made, inventing memories despite having no memory problems.
But, if we confabulate to make sense of a decision we have not made, do we also do so for those we have decided? That is, to what extent when we search in the depths of our mind for an explanation of why we have done something is introspection or remembering our decision making and at what point does this actually become the invention of memories, even if they are of things that did happen? We may make up an explanation after the fact that convinces us and, once we have it, we stop trying to remember what really happened because that involves cognitive effort.
Bibliographical references:
- Johansson P.; Hall L.; Sikström, S.; Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310: pp. 116 - 119
- Hall, L. & Johansson, P. (2008). Using Choice Blindness to study decision making and introspection, En A Smorgasbord of Cognitive Science, ed P Gärdenfors and A Wallin (Nora, Sweden: Nya Doxa, 2008) pp. 267 - 83
- Johansson, P. et. al. (2007). How Something Can Be Said About Telling More Than We Can Know. Consciousness and cognition. 15: pp. 673 - 692; discussion 693. 10.1016/j.concog.2006.09.004.
- Pronin, E. (2009). "The Introspection Illusion". In Mark P. Zanna (ed.). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. 41. Academic Press. pp. 1–67. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00401-2. ISBN 978-0-12-374472-2.
- Malo, P. (2013). La Ilusión de Introspección. Evolución y neurociencias.
(Updated at Apr 14 / 2024)