Illusion Of Introspection: What It Is And How This Cognitive Bias Is Expressed

There are many biases that influence the way we see and process the world. Whether 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 recovering information from our mind, our self-knowledge, our introspection.

The illusion of introspection It is a psychological phenomenon that is the subject of study in the sciences of free will which, basically, means that we cannot even trust the mental states that we attribute to be 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 makes people think, mistakenly, 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 believing that we can access the underlying processes of our mental states without any alteration, despite the fact that most mental processes are inaccessible to a purely conscious interpretation.

According to researchers 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 way concrete. We attribute an entire mental process that will result in a specific behavior, even though what actually happens between the thought and the behavior may be too complex to establish a clear and unidirectional cause-effect relationship.

This bias goes to show that people cannot even be sure that we believe in what we think has led us to behave in a certain way. There have been many experiments that 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 carry out 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 completely free to decide about 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 as self-knowledge. Furthermore, 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 factors of precision, ignorance of the error, choice blindness, change blindness, changes in attitude, introspection focused on 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 even influence when attributing mental states to ourselves conspiring and inferring mental processes that have never actually occurred because, initially, 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 these two photographs, the one that was most attractive to him or the one that he 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 did a trick and showed him the other one, keeping the chosen one.

After this, participants were given 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 an indefinite amount of time to think about their response was the least aware of what their real 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 explain 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 photograph changed and were not deceived and those who were, since this second group was asked to give an explanation for something that 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 many details about the experiment, it was seen that the subjects whose photograph had been changed and therefore had been 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, if they participated in a study where the photograph they had chosen had been changed without warning them, they would really notice the change. As surprising and even comical as it may seem, the vast majority (84%) said that they firmly believed that they would easily detect the change, even though they themselves had just been victims of this 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 change, but as the minutes passed they became blind to the decision they had really made, making the idea that they had actually chosen the right one make more sense in their minds. photograph with which they were being deceived.

Jam experiment

The experiment with the photographs was quite revealing, but it had the limitation that since what was shown in them were women’s faces, one could think that many participants thought they were the same or did not pay as much attention to the details, so perhaps some They didn’t notice the change. For this type, the same Johansson group used 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 two types of jams 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 catch. In each jam jar there were two compartments with different jams whose flavors could be very different. Although the customer saw that they were giving him the second sample from the same jar that he had chosen, in reality what he was given was a different jam than the one he had tried first. Despite having different tastes, less than a third of the participants detected the change

Introspection and confabulation

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

Confabulation has been a cursed word in the history of psychology. Confabulating is inventing 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, several dementia or schizophrenia.

The scientific approach to the illusion of introspection, with the experiments of Johansson, Pronin and many more researchers, has come to demonstrate that confabulating is an act typical of a healthy mind and that it occurs when trying to recover mental states that We attribute them as participants in decision-making and, consequently, our behavior. The participants in Johansson’s two experiments conspire and are healthy, inventing stories after the fact to explain decisions they have not actually made, inventing memories despite not having memory problems.

But, If we collude 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 is it introspection or remembering our decision-making when we search the depths of our mind for an explanation of why we have done something, and at what point does this actually become the invention of memories, even if they are about things? What has happened? We may invent an explanation after the fact that convinces us and, once we have it, we stop trying to remember what really happened because that requires cognitive effort.