Adaptive Unconscious - Introspection Illusion

Introspection Illusion

Although research suggests that much of our preferences, attitudes and ideas come from the adaptive unconscious, subjects themselves do not realise this: they are "unaware of their own unawareness". They give verbal explanations of their own mental processes—for example why they chose one thing rather than another—as if they could directly introspect the causes of their ideas and choices. In some experiments, subjects provide explanations that are clearly confabulated, suggesting that introspection is instead an indirect, unreliable process of inference. It has been argued that this "introspection illusion" underlies a number of perceived differences between the self and other people, because people trust these unreliable introspections when forming attitudes about themselves but not about others. However, this theory of the limits of introspection has been highly controversial, and it has been difficult to test unambiguously how much information individuals get from introspection.