This doesn’t capture everything, but one key piece is “People often confuse a lack of motivation to introspect with a lack of ability to introspect. The fact of confabulation does not demonstrate that people are unable articulate what’s actually happening in principle.” Very related to the other post on confabulation I note above.
Also, if I remember correctly, some of the papers in that meta analysis, just have silly setups: testing whether people can introspect into information that they couldn’t have access too. (Possible that I misunderstood or am miss-remembering.)
To give a short positive account:
All introspection depends on comparison between mental states at different points in time. You can’t introspect on some causal factor that doesn’t vary.
Also, the information has to be available at the time of introspection, ie still in short term memory.
But that gives a lot more degrees for freedom that people seem to predict, and in practice I am able to notice many subtle intentions (such as when my behavior is motivated by signalling), that others want to throw out as unknowable.
Can you too-tersely summarize your Nisbett and Wilson argument?
Or, like… writer a teaser / movie trailer for it, if you’re worried your summary would be incomplete or inoculating?
This doesn’t capture everything, but one key piece is “People often confuse a lack of motivation to introspect with a lack of ability to introspect. The fact of confabulation does not demonstrate that people are unable articulate what’s actually happening in principle.” Very related to the other post on confabulation I note above.
Also, if I remember correctly, some of the papers in that meta analysis, just have silly setups: testing whether people can introspect into information that they couldn’t have access too. (Possible that I misunderstood or am miss-remembering.)
To give a short positive account:
All introspection depends on comparison between mental states at different points in time. You can’t introspect on some causal factor that doesn’t vary.
Also, the information has to be available at the time of introspection, ie still in short term memory.
But that gives a lot more degrees for freedom that people seem to predict, and in practice I am able to notice many subtle intentions (such as when my behavior is motivated by signalling), that others want to throw out as unknowable.