The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 7: The Introspection Illusion

Episode Date: November 21, 2010

A look into the fascinating psychological phenomenon of the introspection illusion. We explore the research behind this phenomenon, and the many implications that it has for human behaviour, including such startling conclusions as people are much more biased, much less observant and much more malleable than they think. If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a paypal donation or becoming a patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything

and welcome to The Science of Everything podcast. I'm your host, James Fodor. In this podcast, I discuss a wide variety of topics in the natural and social sciences, exploring the many fascinating scientific discoveries that can help us better understand the world around us. This is episode number seven, and the topic for today is the introspection illusion. Now, the introspection illusion is something you may not have heard about before. It's a concept from psychology, which is extremely important because it sheds some very, interesting light upon how humans think and how they behave.

So in this episode, first I'll start out with defining the introspection illusion and giving some examples of how it's manifest. And then I will move on to examining a specific manifestation of the introspection illusion, which is referred to as choice blindness, and I will give some examples of studies that have shown that have demonstrated this. After looking at choice blindness, we'll move on to trying to explain, some of the hypothesized explanations for the illusion, for the introspection illusion as to why we have it, why it occurs, and then I will conclude with some practical applications of the introspection illusion

in how we can understand certain aspects of life and certain things that happen in human society. So first of all, let's start with what is the introspection illusion? Well, the introspection illusion effectively refers to the fact that although people do not typically claim to be immune to such biases as wishful thinking, overconfidence, defensiveness, cloned, closeness, et cetera. They do not typically recognize when they are actually succumbing to these biases in any particular incident, in which they are succumbing to these biases. So what seems to happen is that people look into their own minds to see if they are being biased about a particular decision or situation that is occurring. They fail to find any evidence for such a

bias and hence they conclude that they are being objective. The interesting thing is that while we are not particularly comforted when we hear someone else say that they have looked into their own hearts and minds and concluded that they are being objective, we consider that when we do this for ourselves, that is sufficient proof that we are being objective. So there is an asymmetry here. We look into ourselves and find no bias and say we are objective and believe it. We hear other people say that they've looked into themselves and say that they find no bias, and we don't believe that that is. We look into ourselves, and we don't believe that that is a legitimate legitimate proof that they are being objective.

So this asymmetrical attitude towards our objective versus the objectiveness of other people is referred to the introspection illusion, because people have missed place confidence in the validity of their own introspection compared to the introspections of others

when it comes to analysing their own behaviour and attitudes. Now, there are many, many examples of biases attributable to the introspection illusion. And I have a whole bunch of studies linked to on the notes page to this episode with some references to these and examples of them, and I'll just read out some of them now. So examples of cognitive biases attributable to the introspection illusion. When people have been asked to rank themselves on a level of objectivity,

using a comparative scale, people on average claim their judgments to be more objective than the judgments of their peers. Now obviously, everyone's judgments cannot be more objective than average. So people are inflating the objectivity of their own judgments. This tendency overflows into a variety of other areas as well, as people tend to rate themselves as better than average

on a wide variety of traits and abilities, whilst also claiming that their overly positive views are objectively true. People can also get very warped ideas about causality, such as having thoughts about an event before it occurs, can prompt us

to think that we cause it, even if such causation seems magical. Now this might sound ridiculous, but studies have actually been done whereby they'll get subjects to be watching someone taking basketball shots and then ask the subjects to think about the person getting the shots in. So if you like, they ask the subjects to will the person to get the shots in. And then when the subject, sorry, when the basketball player does get some shots in, they, a certain number in a row, they ask the subjects how much they imagine or they think that they're thinking about the basketball player has affected his ability to get the shots in and people report a certain increased level of influence over the number of

shots that the person's managed to get in even though there's clearly no logical reason why their thoughts could influence the basketball player and this has also been manifested in animals which have been habituated to perform certain behaviors in order to receive food so basically, for example, it was determined that food was given at random intervals, and if it so happened that a bird was pecking a certain area or moving in a certain direction or whatever, just before the food was delivered, the animal could, under certain circumstances, become trained essentially to continually do that behavior every time it wanted food, even though the food was delivered at random intervals. So, the behavior has no effect on whether the animal

gets the food or not, but because it performed that behavior at one time just before food arrived, it seems to have got this idea into its head or become habituated to the idea that a certain behavior leads to food being provided. And as I said, similar studies have been performed in humans. It seems to be this inbuilt need that we have to associate our actions with causation, even if there seems to be no logical reason for why that causation could exist. People tend also to view self-interest as more important in others than in themselves. For example, people have responded on surveys that they assume that other people who work hard at their jobs are motivated mostly by external incentives such as money, whereas they claim

that they personally are motivated by internal incentives such as feeling a sense of accomplishment. So once again, we see this disconnect between how someone assesses themselves and how someone assesses other people. Another interesting result from some studies, people claim freedom from racial bias and from gender bias and other such biases, even in circumstances where they have been shown to demonstrate these biases, and at times even showing these biases more strongly the more objective they claim to be. Once again, we see this example of people introspecting about their level of bias, their level of objectivity, and coming to a completely erroneous conclusion about how objective that they are being.

And nevertheless, still remaining convinced that they are being objective. Another interesting finding is that is in regards to how people perceive those who agree with them versus those who disagree with them. Now, obviously, you would expect people to consider themselves to be more objective and more rational than those people who disagree with them, say, on a political or a religious or an ideological issue. That wouldn't be very surprising. Indeed, that is the case. But another interesting finding has been that people also tend to believe that those who agree with them, say, about a certain political issue, are more likely to have arrived at those views as a result of valid reasoning and good logic in comparison to those who disagree with them. So, you see, this is a rather

odd view because just because someone happens to agree with you about something really tells you nothing about the likelihood that they have arrived at that viewpoint as a result of rational deduction or logical reasoning. They could have arrived at the same conclusion as you through totally erroneous methodologies, but nevertheless people assume that because they hold an opinion, others who hold that opinion must have arrived at it, or at least are more

likely to have arrived at it, through logical reasoning processes. Yet another aspect and consequence of the introspection illusion. Now, I want to talk about some notable studies that have demonstrated the introspection illusion, because it's all very well for me to sit here, giving examples

and saying, well, people do this and people do that. but here I want to give you some very concrete evidence to prove, to show how psychologists have actually come to these opinions about human behavior. So one study in the year 2000, in this study participants were asked to predict their own behavior and also the behavior of an average student in situations where one might be influenced by self-interest, like giving money to charity and so on.

The predictions suggested that participants believed self-interest would play little role in determining their own decision to support the charity, but would play a considerable role in determining others' decisions. So effectively, people predicted that others would be more self-interested than they would. As it turned out, on average, predictions about the self-interest of others were accurate. So when people predicted that other people would tend to be self-interested in regards to giving to charities, that was correct. But predictions about themselves that they would not be particularly self-interested turned out to be wrong.

So this is a clear case of the introspection of losing where people are introspecting about their own ability to be charitable or non-self-interested and coming to completely erroneous conclusions about their ability to do so, about their own internal tendencies or preferences, whatever you want to call them. Another series of studies by Miller and Ratner from 1998

showed... So in this study, participants were found to overestimate the extent to which prospective blood donors would be influenced by economic incentives, and also the extent to which smokers and non-smokers would differ about the legitimacy of smoking restrictions. So this suggests that people overestimate the role that incentives and other self-interested motives play in the responses of others. Once again, a clear example of attributing the behavior of others to external factors and the behavior of ourselves to internal factors. Proninetal from 2002 examined a wide range of well-known biases,

including self-serving attributions for success, dissonance reduction after free choice, bias assimilation of new information to cohere with the pre-existing beliefs, perceptions of hostile media bias towards one's group or cause, the fundamental attribution error, which is manifested by blaming the victim for something, allowing one's judgments about the greater good to be influenced by self-interest and so on,

a very large range of biases, so in this study they tested them on a whole bunch of people, and participants were overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly found to report that they personally were less susceptible to each of these biases than the average American. So this, again, an example of how people are not aware, on average, of their own lack of objectivity. Another study by Pernianetal, this time in 2004, revealed that participants thought that their own introspection had greater value than those of their peers. That is, participants claimed that in making self-assessments, it would be more,

more valuable for them to consult internal information, that is introspection, you know, looking into your own head and seeing what you find there, than general behavioral theories, you know, general psychological theories of human behavior, but that if others were making such self-assessments, the reverse would be true. So that might sound a little confusing. Basically, subjects reported that if they had to make an assessment about their own likely behavior, it would be more useful for them to consult internal information, that is introspection, then it would be them to consult general behavioral theories. That's for them.

But they claimed that if others were making self-assessments about their behavior, so these other people are making self-ass assessments about their behavior, it would be more useful for them to consult general behavioral theories rather than introspection. So effectively, this means that people think that only they have reliable introspection. Now, I don't think people consciously thought this. I'm sure the questionnaires are designed in a careful way. so that it's not obvious exactly what the study is looking for. Generally, that's the way psychological studies are done.

The actual purpose of the study is sort of disguised, so as to remove as much bias as possible. So people are not consciously thinking these things, but through their answers to questions, we can infer that that's sort of the thought process that's going on behind the scenes. And in one final study, also by proninatal, participants were randomly assigned either high or low scores

in a putitative test of social intelligence. This study is really interesting. So they gave subjects a test that was supposed to be about social intelligence, but really it was just a bogus test. And scores were randomly assigned to them, either high scores or low scores. And then the subjects, after receiving scores, were asked to judge the test based on how valid the test was. Now, it was found that those who received high scores tended to judge the test as valid and attributed while those who scored low scores on the test tended to judge it as invalid.

But what's even more interesting is that those who judged the test as valid attributed their unsuccessful partner's claims that it was not valid to ego-defensive bias, whereas those who received low scores and therefore pronounce the test as invalid attributed their partner's claims

that the test was valid to self-serving ego enhancement. So each party to this study whether they received high or low scores claimed that their assessment was objective and that the assessment of the other party was caused by self-serving bias. Yet another example of how our interpretation of our own introspection is totally in contradiction

to how the weight we place upon other people's introspections. So that's a broad overview of the introspection illusion. Now I want to move on to look more specifically at one aspect of the introspection illusion, which is choice blindness. And this is really, really interesting stuff. There are some fascinating. of fascinating experiments which I'd like to explain in some more detail. So I just want to jump straight into it here, starting with the face experiment.

So in this study, subjects were shown two pictures of female faces at the same time. And they were asked to, these were male subjects, by the way, and they were asked to select which of the two faces they found the most attractive. And so they made the selection, and then immediately the experimenter sort of took down the two pictures and then handed one of the pictures over to the subject to examine in closer detail. Now, what the subjects did not know, however,

is that in some of the trials, through sleight of hand, the experimenter gave the subject the female face that they did not choose to examine more closely. So in these trials, the subject picked a face as being more attractive, but they were given the photo of the other face

that they didn't choose to examine more closely. And then, after they were given the photo to examine more closely, the subjects were asked to explain the reason for their choice. So why did you think this person was more attractive than the other one? The first interesting aspect of the study is that most of the manipulated trials were not even recognised. And this is what gives this phenomenon the name of choice blindness. People made a choice but didn't notice that their choice had actually been changed

or that they'd been given something different to what they'd chosen. So you might say, well, you know, they didn't see the original picture for that long and they probably weren't examining it in excruciating detail. so, you know, why should you expect them to notice? And, okay, fair enough. Maybe it's not so surprising that not many people noticed that the photos had been manipulated. But what would you expect them then to say

when they were forced to explain their choice? If you presented someone with a choice that they didn't actually choose and then asked them to explain why they chose it, you would expect them to react a bit strangely, perhaps you would expect some things like that they would show less emotional engagement with the choice, that they would be less specific about the report, that they made about their reasons why they made their choice,

and they should also express less certainty and be more hesitant about explaining their choice. You would expect that if they were asked to explain a choice that they never actually made. However, the study actually found that there were no significant differences between the manipulated and non-manipulated reports. Now, they used a whole bunch of different techniques to compare the reports that were made, the explanations as to why one was chosen and the other. You can look into the original report, which I linked to on the show notes for this, podcast and reads some examples of the comments people made as to why they preferred one over the other

and they put them in a table manipulated versus non-manipulated trials and really they're very very similar things people say all sorts of detailed things like i think it was her eyes or she has nice hair or she has a nice smile or whatever even when they're describing faces that they did not choose as being more attractive and the experimenters also did more rigorous comparative linguistics and latent semantic analysis tests on the reports look looking for things like words that expressed a strong opinion one way or the other, or a particularly emotive language versus hesitant or unsure language. They look for these sorts of things compared to length of them as well,

and they found no difference. So the conclusion of this study is that people did not really make a selection about their preferred choice and then explain that preference. What they actually did was make a choice, and they were presented with a face, and then they confabulated a reason. as to why they chose that face. Now, we'll look into this a bit more in a bit more detail further on in the podcast.

This might seem like an extreme claim to make that people don't actually make choices based on their preferences, that they simply have choices presented to them and then confabulate a reason, come up with a reason, invent a reason that sounds plausible as to why they made this choice. But that seems to be where the evidence is pointing. So let's have a look at some more studies that tend to, indicate this. Now, one of these is the poster experiment. So in this study, subjects were

required to choose one of five posters that they preferred, and then provide reasons for why they preferred it, and then they were allowed to take their preferred poster home with them, and they will follow it up with a month later and asked how satisfied they were with the posters that they'd chosen. So I should say only some of the subjects were asked to provide reasons for why they chose one poster. Others were not asked to provide any reasons. The study found that those who were asked to provide reasons for their preference actually tended to choose different posters. They tended to choose posters that were more humorous

and kind of had a verbal message written on them rather than more traditional types of representational art. The other difference was that those who had to provide reasons for their explanation tended about a month later when they were followed up to be less satisfied overall with their choice. And I'll come back to, to explain this study later on. Why on earth would, just asking for a reason, change people's choices and then lead them to be less satisfied with their choice? It seems silly, but

we, it is, that is consistent with the fact of choice blindness and introspection illusion and does have a fairly compelling explanation, but we'll get to that later on. I just want to go through quickly the T and Jam experiment. Basically, this was a variation of the face experiment, except it was conducted at a local supermarket, so not in a laboratory, it's in a real-life situation, where passes by were invited to sample different varieties of JAMA tea, decide which alternative they preferred the most, and then after they had made their choice,

they were given the sample again, the one that they'd chosen, to sample once again, and then they were asked to explain why they made the choice. But as with the phase experiment, on half of the trials, through the sleight of hand, they actually gave the person the product that they did not choose, so either the type of jam or the type of T that the subjects did not choose,

they were given that variety to sample again and then to explain why they made that choice. Once again, the study found that only a minority, about a third of manipulated trials were detected, and that's using a generous definition of manipulated trials. If you use more restricted definitions, depending on where they made the detection, it drops to like a fifth or a third. sixth or something, of manipulated trials were actually detected.

And this applies even for remarkably different tastes. For example, cinnamon apple versus bitter grapefruit, or the smell of mango versus the smell of pinaud. So very odd that most of these were not detected. Thus, further demonstrating considerable levels of choice blindness, even for things like taste and smell. So it seems that it does not just apply to sight, which is, I think, another reason that they conducted this experiment as a follow-up to the Fates experiment.

Okay, so we've got this introspection illusion where people have extremely inaccurate insights into what they're really thinking and what their own preferences are, and they also seem to have a total inability to detect changes in choices that are presented to them, and do not really seem to have good reasons for their preferences, but rather seem to be confabulating reasons for their choices after the fact. Why would this be the case? What's going on here? Well, one, I think, very useful concept that's been put forward to explain this illusion is called naive realism.

Now, the core concept of naive realism is the conviction that what one perceives, so the objects and events that one perceives, reflect the world as it really is, so that we have an objective insight into fundamental, reality, the way the world really is. And, once again, this might seem like a funny thing to think, because I think everyone knows that, you know, we only see certain wavelengths of light, we only hear, you know, certain sounds.

For example, dogs can hear certain frequencies of sound that we cannot hear. So we have a subjective version of reality presented to us through our senses. I think most people realize that. But they don't really apply that insight into the way they interact with the world. seem to have, we seem to be subject to this naive realism, we seem to be subject to this kind of lingering conception that we somehow plug directly into fundamental reality and that everyone else, or everything else that perceives differently to us, somehow has a defective, a defective connection to that reality. So, for example, we know that whales and bats and

other things use echolocation to detect their environment, and other animals rely much more heavily on touch than we do, and some rely more heavily on smell, et cetera. We know this, but we seem to have this idea that these animals don't have the same access to fundamental reality that we do. They have some kind of defective version, like a bad copy of reality, whereas we have the real version. We have the objective version. And as a result of this naive realism, we expect that other reasonable and attentive people who perceive the same things as we do will come to. to the same conclusions as we do. So, because we think that we have this direct access to objective reality, we expect that other reasonable and attentive people who see the same stuff

will come to the same conclusions as we do, because, you know, our conclusions are based on an objective inside into reality. Now, as a result of this, when people presented with the same information or situations as us, react or think differently as a result, we conclude that it must be some fault of their own, that they are being biased, or that they're, that they're, their perceptions are based on faulty assumptions, etc. Now, it seems that the introspection illusion, aside from naive realism, is also based upon this phenomenon of inaccessible thoughts. Basically, although people can report very accurately on the contents of their thoughts,

the actual psychological processes that are the true determinants of their behavior are often inaccessible to introspection. So basically, you can say what you're thinking about, but you often can't really say why you are thinking that. A classic example might be you can clearly say that you like this or that food, you like this or that movie, you like this or that art piece or whatever, but often it's very difficult, if not impossible, to explain why. You might get angry in response to a situation,

and you really don't know why you got angry, you just did. Many of it seems that many of the psychological processes that go into determining our behaviour are simply inaccessible to our introspection. We cannot, we don't know why we did that. We can't look into our minds and see how these processes occur, just as you can't look into your mind and control the rate of your digestion or control directly the related with your heartbeats. You can't control these underlying psychological processes.

You can just sort of see what comes out of them, what boils to the surface, if you like, which is our conscious awareness. And indeed it may well be that most cognitive biases occur at this sort of unconscious level, or at least a level of, that is not accessible to conscious introspection. And that's why when we consciously introspect and look for biases, we don't find any. And the reason is because they are occurring places where our conscious

introspection cannot go. And this seems to be consistent with the idea that much of human judgment and action is driven by unconscious or subconscious processes. For example, people can form emotions, pursue their goals, adopt attitudes, regulate many of their actions, without really much conscious effort or attention at all. Nevertheless, the trouble is that people often rely on conscious introspection

when seeking self-understanding, and also when seeking to understand the behaviours of others. And as a result of this over, reliance on introspective information, people are often misled in their attempts of self-insights. So basically, the fact that we have so much information available to us about our own mental states, you know, we look into our own minds, and there's so much stuff there we can talk about and we can see, that we tend to way over rely on this information when explaining our behaviors and evaluating our own actions.

And we neglect such things as, you know, observable behaviors, external factors, etc., you know, like external incentives, for example, that might affect our behavior, because we've just got this huge mountain of internal information there. Even though we can't actually access, as I said before, we can't actually access the underlying psychological processes. we can access, there's still a whole heap of stuff on the surface that sort of comes to our consciousness that we can get access to, you know, the contents of our thought processes. We have so much stuff there that we place an excessive amount of emphasis on using this type of information to explain our behavior and to explain our attitudes.

Now, when it comes to explaining the behavior and attitudes of others, we do not have access to all this information. and therefore we give much more weight to external factors, like that they might be being biased by financial incentives or by their preconceived notions, etc. So it seems, in fact, that the access to a huge quantity of internal introspective information about our own thoughts is actually leading us to come to worse conclusions about our own behaviour,

worse explanations as to why we do things and why we think things. Now, this leads me to the final point about introspection of preferences. Now, remember the face study where people were unable, sorry, were able to give highly detailed explanations for choices that they didn't actually make. What's with that? Well, remember, as I said before, that people do not often know or have introspective access to the reasons why they feel a particular way or have a particular subjective preference.

And so, as a result, when people are asked to explain why they have these particular preferences or particular attitudes. They tend to fall, we tend to fall back on reasons that are easiest to articulate and that come to mind first. And this seems to even happen when the actual reasons for our preferences are not known to us. And so it does seem that the very fact of being asked to articulate our preferences leads to a change in our preferences. And this seems to have been what happened in the poster experiment.

When people were asked to explain why they preferred a certain. certain poster, they tended to fall back on the explanations that were easiest to provide, and thus they tended to choose the more modern cartoony sort of pictures, which had interesting motivational phrases, because it's easy to make up something about, you know, I liked this phrase, because it means this or provided this motivation, etc. Whereas it's much harder to explain why you like, you know, just some random picture of someone sitting in a chair, for example. So, when actually asked to provide a reason, people fell back upon the easiest reason that they could provide than that sounded most plausible to others.

And this actually led them to, subconsciously, it seems, change their preference and come to think they liked the thing that they didn't actually originally choose or would not have chosen if they had not been asked to articulate their preference. However, this only seems to, this change of preference only seems to apply in the actual situation when people are, asked to articulate their preferences. In the long run, people tend to revert to their original manners of assessing things, which do not generally include clearly articulating a reason. If you look at a painting on the wall, just the hanging up in your house, you don't typically, every time you walk past it consciously go through all the reasons as to why you like it, you probably just think, you know, I like it or I don't like it, oh, you know, oh, that's a nice

painting. You don't go through it all in your own mind. And this seems to explain why in the poster experiment, people who were asked to articulate the reason for their original decision and therefore whose original choice was shifted towards the motivational painting, one month later, these people reported a lower level of satisfaction with their choice. The reason seems to be that over that time, they reverted to their original attitudes towards how they valued these sorts of things. They stopped articulating in their minds the reason for why they chose that particular poster and just relied sort of on the subjective subconscious things that they don't even really understand that they cannot introspect to and therefore found that they liked it much

less. And this led to the eventual higher degree of satisfaction with decisions that they had to explain. Now, what are some practical applications of all this very interesting research? Well, one application is in understanding the conflict spiral. which is where each side perceives themselves to be acting defensively to the aggressive and self-interested actions of the other party. And a classic case of this is in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where each side is, or at least many people on each side, are fully convinced that they are in the rights,

that they are acting defensively and rationally and are objectively being fair about the situation, whereas the other side is being aggressive and self-interested, bigoted, etc. Each side seems to think that about the other. And this occurs in all sorts of circumstances, you know, from international conflicts to domestic arguments about petty matters. Why does this always happen? How come each side can genuinely think that they are being objective and the other side is being self-interested? Well, it seems that the introspection illusion can explain that, because each side is faced with effectively the same evidence, you know, the same objective

situation. But they come to very different conclusions, obviously. You know, one side thinks they should have X, the other side thinks they should have X. They introspect into their own minds. They fail to find any evidence of subjectivity or bias there, and therefore conclude that the other side must be biased. They're not biased, so the other guy must be biased, because obviously we're presented with the same objective information here, so the only reason he could possibly come to another conclusion than me is that he's biased. and this also might be exacerbated by the tendency mentioned before of people to regard those within their own group

or sharing their opinion as being more objective and less self-interested than those who disagree with them. So this would tend to, this tendency to view your group as more rational than their group would tend to exacerbate this factor. And research also shows that when a person perceives the other person to be biased, they will act in a more confrontational and in a more aggressive manner towards them. However, this, ironically, this only affirms the belief of the other person that the first person was biased, thus perpetuating the cycle.

So basically what happens is, each side comes to a different conclusion about what should happen. Bob thinks that he should get it, and Sandy thinks that he should get it, even when they're presented with the same objective information. As a result, they each sort of look into their own minds, probably subconsciously, you know, they're not thinking through all of this, but they each look into their own minds and see, well, I'm not being biased. You know, there's this and that and the other thing, and they present all these reasons to themselves and say,

oh, I clearly should get this. The other person could see all this evidence, but he's not coming to the same conclusion as me. So he must be being biased and self-interested. Therefore, I'm going to be more aggressive towards him. I'm going to be more confrontational towards him. And then each acts more confrontationally and aggressively towards the other, because they perceive them to be more biased.

And then each sees the aggressive and confrontational attitude of the other, and that acts as proof that the other party is being biased. and thus the conflict cycle perpetuates itself. And this, I think, is actually quite a convincing explanation based on sound psychological research as to how things like the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Pakistani-Indian conflict and many, many others, can just go on for decades and decades.

Each perceives the other to be biased, and each perceives themselves to be in the right. And it's not just that they're somehow blinded, or that they're deliberately doing it, or that they're just pretending that they consider them to be right as a cover. They really think that they are right. They really think they're being more objective than the other side. The studies clearly show this, that people really think that they are more objective than other people. And this all stems from a fundamental overestimation of the

ability we have to introspect, that is to look inwards and examine our own thoughts and feelings and preferences, and to get objective information as a result of them. So, in conclusion, I'd just like to read an interesting quote that I found from a blog which was one of the stimulations for me to do this podcast and once again I have a link to this on the show notes. So the quote is, this is explaining basically the introspection illusion in a nutshell. You look at what you did or how you felt and you make up some sort of explanation which you can reasonably believe that explains this. If you have to tell it to others, you make up an explanation they can believe too, end quote.

And that is essentially a choice blind. understand the introspection illusion in a nutshell. It seems that we don't really have preferences, or if we do, they're very deeply buried in the subconscious, and that when we give reasons for explaining this or that preference, they are probably confabulations. So, on that cheerful note, that's all I have for this week. And if you enjoyed this podcast,

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