Illusion of introspection: what it is and how this cognitive bias is expressed

There are many biases that influence our way of seeing and processing the world. Whether they are visual or auditory illusions, social phenomena or of another nature, our way of capturing 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 also, our way of recovering information from our mind, our self-knowledge, our introspection.

The illusion of introspection It is a psychological phenomenon that is the object of study of the sciences of free will that, basically, comes to say that we cannot even trust the mental states that we attribute to be behind our decisions.

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What is the illusion of introspection?

The illusion of introspection is an expression coined by Emily Pronin which refers to the cognitive bias that makes people 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 states. mental processes without any alteration, despite the fact that most mental processes are inaccessible to a purely aware.

According to scholars of this phenomenon, the illusion of introspection makes people make complex explanations about our own behavior based on causal theories, that is, if we have behaved in a certain way, it is because we have thought in a certain way. concrete. We attribute a whole mental process that will result in a specific behavior, despite the fact that what actually happens between thought and behavior may be too complex to establish a clear cause-and-effect relationship. one way.

This bias goes to show that people cannot even be sure of believing what we think has led us to behave in a certain way. Many have been the experiments that have suggested that our philosophical idea of ​​"introspection", far from being a process that leads us to direct access of the thoughts, motives or decisions that lead us to carry out a behavior, in reality it is 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 on our own behavior and that this is rationally based. We infer our own mental states, believing it to be introspection and mistaking a mere inference made after the fact for self-knowledge. In addition, we tend to think that others do get confused and that they tend to be more biased and conformist.

Scientific investigation of this phenomenon

There are many investigations that 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 the precision factors, error unawareness, choice blindness, change blindness, attitude changes, self-centered introspection feelings…

photo 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 when it comes to attributing mental states to ourselves, conspiring and inferring mental processes that have never really occurred because, at first, the final behavior was not planned 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 one. Participants were asked to choose one of those two photographs., the one that you find most attractive or the one that you like best. Some participants were asked to choose, but once they did, the researchers did a very interesting thing: they changed the photo. When the volunteer chose a photo, the researcher did a trick and showed him the other, keeping the chosen one.

After this, the participants were given some time to think about why they had made their decision. Some were only given 2 seconds, others 5 and others were given a long time. The group that was given indefinite time to think about their answer was the least aware of it. what their actual choice had been, since only 27% of the participants in that condition noticed the change. The rest were convinced that they had chosen the photograph 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 photo changed and were not deceived and those who were, since This second group was asked to give an explanation of something that they had not really decided on and, therefore, there should not be the memory that they had taken that decision. 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 the participants in terms of three dimensions: emotionality, specificity and certainty. Without going into too much detail about the experiment, it was seen that the subjects whose photograph had been changed and therefore had manipulated gave explanations with the same confidence, degree of detail and emotionality as those who had not had their photo changed.

At the end of the experiment, the deceived participants were asked one last question, which was whether they believed that, in the event of Participate in a study where the photograph they had chosen had been changed without warning, would they 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, despite the fact that they themselves had just been victims of that deception.

The researchers themselves comment that this phenomenon it is also connected to that of change blindness, and which is closely related to a phenomenon that the authors of this study call choice blindness. The participants could have noticed the change during the first seconds after the switch, but as the minutes passed they became blind to the decision that they had actually taken, making the idea that they had actually chosen the photograph with which they were being presented make more sense in their minds. cheating

• You may be interested in: "Theories of causal attribution: definition and authors"

jam experiment

The experiment with the photographs was quite revealing, but it had the limitation that, since they were women's faces, what was shown in them was I could think that many participants thought they were the same or did not pay as much attention to the details, so perhaps some did not notice the difference. change. For this type the same group of Johansson made use of another experiment involving another sensory pathway: taste.

These same researchers went to a supermarket and set up a stand where they gave visitors two types of jam to try. Once their innocent experimental subject had chosen which jar he wanted to try, they gave him a first sample, then a second and finally he was asked to explain the reasons why he had preferred that particular jam.

However, there was a trick. In each jar of jam there were two compartments with different jams whose flavors could be very different. Despite the fact that the client saw that they were giving him the second sample from the same jar that she had chosen, in reality what he was given was a different jam from the one he had tried first. Despite having different tastes, less than a third of the participants detected the change.

introspection and collusion

Seeing these two curious experiments, which are in the same line as many others carried out in the field of science cognitive, we can affirm that the final result or behavior influences the way in which we give an explanation to its occurrence. That is to say, we attribute mental processing to it that may not have occurred and focus more on what the end result is rather than remembering what actually happened.

Conspiracy has been a cursed word in the history of psychology. To connive is to invent stories, filling in the gaps in our memory, something traditionally associated as a symptom and strategy of people who suffer from some type of disease, disorder or syndrome that impairs the storage of memories, such as Korsakoff syndrome, various dementias or schizophrenia.

The scientific approach to the illusion of introspection, with the experiments of Johansson, Pronin and many other researchers, has come to demonstrate that conspiring is an act characteristic of a healthy mind and that occurs when trying to recover mental states that we attribute as participants in decision-making and, consequently, our conduct. Participants in both Johansson's experiments collude and are healthy, making up stories after the fact to explain decisions that they have not really made, inventing memories despite not having problems with memory.

But, If we conspire to make sense of a decision that we have not made, do we also do it for those that we have decided? That is, to what extent when we search the depths of our minds for the explanation of why we have done something is it introspection or remembering our decision making and at what point this becomes reality in the invention of memories, even if they are of things that have happened? We may come up with an explanation after the fact that convinces us and, once we have it, we stop trying to remember what really happened because that takes cognitive effort.

Bibliographic references:

• Johansson P.; HallL.; Sikstrom, S.; Olson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310:pp. 116 - 119
• Hall, L. & Johanson, P. (2008). Using Choice Blindness to study decision making and introspection, In A Smorgasbord of Cognitive Science, ed P Gärdenfors and A Wallin (Nora, Sweden: Nya Doxa, 2008) pp. 267 - 83
• Johanson, P. et. to the. (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.
• Pronon, E. (2009). "The Introspection Illusion". In Mark P. Zana (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.
• Bad, p. (2013). The Illusion of Introspection. Evolution and neurosciences.