The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others' mental states from their behaviour.
When people mistake unreliable introspection for genuine self-knowledge, the result can be an illusion of superiority over other people, for example when each person thinks they are less biased and less conformist than the rest of the group. Even when experimental subjects are provided with reports of other subjects' introspections, in as detailed a form as possible, they still rate those other introspections as unreliable while treating their own as reliable. Although the hypothesis of an introspection illusion informs some psychological research, the existing evidence is arguably inadequate to decide how reliable introspection is in normal circumstances.
In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behaviour (called "causal theories") or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
Correction for the bias may be possible through education about the bias and its unconscious nature.
Components
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". The causal theories provided after an action will often serve only to justify the person's behaviour in order to relieve cognitive dissonance. That is, a person may not have noticed the true reasons for their behaviour, even when trying to explain it. The result is an explanation that mostly merely makes themselves feel better. An example might be a man who mistreats others who have a specific quality because he is embarrassed that he himself has that quality. He may not admit this to himself, instead claiming that his prejudice is because he has concluded that the specific quality is bad.
A 1977 paper by psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson challenged the directness and reliability of introspection, thereby becoming one of the most cited papers in the science of consciousness. reprinted in Nisbett and Wilson reported on experiments in which subjects verbally explained why they had a particular preference, or how they arrived at a particular idea. On the basis of these studies and existing attribution research, they concluded that reports on mental processes are confabulated. They wrote that subjects had, "little or no introspective access to higher order cognitive processes". They distinguished between mental contents (such as feelings) and mental processes, arguing that while introspection gives us access to contents, processes remain hidden.
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. 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. Updating the theory in 2002, Wilson admitted that the 1977 claims had been too far-reaching. He instead relied on the theory that the adaptive unconscious does much of the moment-to-moment work of perception and behaviour. When people are asked to report on their mental processes, they cannot access this unconscious activity. 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. Availability: Stimuli that are highly salient (either due to recency or being very memorable) are more likely to be recalled and considered for the cause of a response. Plausibility: Whether a person finds a stimulus to be a sufficiently likely cause for an effect determines the influence it has on their reporting of the stimulus. Removal in time: The greater the distance in time since the occurrence of an event, the less available and more difficult to accurately recall it is. Mechanics of judgment: People do not recognize the influence that judgment factors (e.g., position effects) have on them, leading to inaccuracies in self-reporting. Context: Focusing on the context of an object distracts from evaluation of that object and can lead people to falsely believe that their thoughts about the object are represented by the context. Non-events: The absence of an occurrence is naturally less salient and available than an occurrence itself, leading nonevents to have little influence on reports. Nonverbal behaviour: While people receive a large amount of information about others via nonverbal cues, the verbal nature of relaying information and the difficulty of translating nonverbal behaviour into verbal form lead to its lower reporting frequency. Discrepancy between the magnitudes of cause and effect: Because it seems natural to assume that a certain size cause will lead to a similarly-sized effect, connections between causes and effects of different magnitudes are not often drawn.
Unawareness of error
Several hypotheses to explain people's unawareness of their inaccuracies in introspection were provided by Nisbett and Wilson: Confusion between content and process: People are usually unable to access the exact process by which they arrived at a conclusion, but can recall an intermediate step prior to the result. However, this step is still content in nature, not a process. The confusion of these discrete forms leads people to believe that they are able to understand their judgment processes. Nisbett and Wilson have been criticized for failing to provide a clear definition of the differences between mental content and mental processes. 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