Well, people are sometimes bad at introspection. And there are ideas that bring you social reward if you profess believing in them, and social punishment if you profess disbelief (unless you are trying to get points for being contrarian, which complicates things). So it would be reasonable to expect that our introspection is biased towards what is socially rewarded.
On the other hand, how strong can such bias be? (If someone reports “97%”, should we expect the real value to be somewhere around 95%, 90%, 70%, 50%, 30%, or 10%?) Are there things that make this bias stronger or weaker? (Such as anonymity, age, profession, introversion, intelligence, etc.) Because then the accusations of bias could suggest a presence or absence of such traits.
I don’t want this to develop into a fully general counterargument to anything people say about their preferences. But social pressure is real.
Well, people are sometimes bad at introspection. And there are ideas that bring you social reward if you profess believing in them, and social punishment if you profess disbelief (unless you are trying to get points for being contrarian, which complicates things). So it would be reasonable to expect that our introspection is biased towards what is socially rewarded.
On the other hand, how strong can such bias be? (If someone reports “97%”, should we expect the real value to be somewhere around 95%, 90%, 70%, 50%, 30%, or 10%?) Are there things that make this bias stronger or weaker? (Such as anonymity, age, profession, introversion, intelligence, etc.) Because then the accusations of bias could suggest a presence or absence of such traits.
I don’t want this to develop into a fully general counterargument to anything people say about their preferences. But social pressure is real.
It depends on the strength of the social pressure.