Upvoted for your thoughtful reply, which clarified a number of your points quite well. I will try to address some of your points and ask questions for those things I am still unclear on. Firstly, in your previous posts, it seems like you are discussing two separate issues—the first is the extent to which our decisions are based on external factors, the second is the extent to which our decisions are based on unconscious processing as opposed to conscious processing of those factors. Since your last post focused more on the second issue, this post will do so as well.
Here is what I did to analyze in more detail the position you are taking. I followed the link you supplied (this link being one of the reasons I upvoted your post—also, the use of the quote is very helpful to quickly establish relevance) and also used that page to get some information on the original source of the study mentioned. This led me to a paper by Nisbett and Wilson where this experiment is described by the original researchers. They also did a review of the literature to describe similar studies.
Reading Nisbett and Wilson’s paper changed my point of view on this subject since they discussed a variety of confabulation research in great detail. I would now agree that unconscious reasons can be an important component of understanding healthy decisions, although I still think this doesn’t always tell you any more useful information than the conscious reasons (specifically this may not always or even usually be the case where the conscious reason is correct, regardless of whether it is a confabulation). Their description of the 1931 experiment by Maier stood out especially for me, since it showed that healthy individuals could incorrectly explain how they knew the answer to a problem (as opposed to just saying that they don’t know how they figured it out). I’m not sure why I found this additional information more compelling than the more relevant clothing example. Maybe it helped to illustrate the more widespread existence of confabulation in cognition. I’ll have to think about this.
However, I think this paper outlined an important distinction, and that is that even when the reasons are correct, this doesn’t mean that they were discovered from introspection. Your link also discusses this concept of confabulation. However, a confabulation is not necessarily wrong (it is just necessarily not obtained from introspection). When the reasons are correct, they are still consciously known. It would be incorrect to say that they are not consciously known. It might be correct to say that the reasons for the reasons are not consciously known, but this is not quite the same thing.
I will now address some specific questions I have about the evidence you presented for your position. Let’s consider the right-side bias you presented. This is a good example because obviously nothing intrinsic to the clothing improves if you place it on someone’s right, and yet people overwhelmingly chose the item on the right (and they got the reason for this wrong). Yet I have questions about the applicability of this to everyday decisions. For example, how much stronger is this specific bias than conscious factors? If instead of being presented with identical items, the items are different, would this bias still be relevant?
For the other one involving color choice based on emotions felt at the time, I was not able to find any support. Is this factor also based on research, or just a hypothetical scenario? Am I missing something obvious? I know of claims that colors affect emotion, but am unaware of claims that current emotions affect color choice.
people who believe that certain specific external things motivate their dress and other things don’t may be wrong or may be right about each of those things
Okay. That makes sense to me, then.
I said I don’t think that!
True. It was an unfortunate typo on my part. I have since corrected the post above to reflect my actual meaning.
I think more goes into decision making than attempting to achieve satisfaction.
What do you mean by this? Can you give an example of what a person’s thought processes would be doing when making a decision (whether conscious or unconscious) besides attempting to achieve satisfaction? TheFreeDictionary.com states that satisfaction is ‘The fulfillment or gratification of a desire, need, or appetite.’ Maybe you mean that some of the ways the brain is wired to choose things do not actually fulfill this requirement, but are simply some sort of artifact of the wiring itself? For example, maybe this is true of the right-side preference you gave earlier. Nevertheless, if our minds have a component that positively justifies such seemingly irrelevant decisions through confabulation (ie. unconsciously making stuff up), it would seem that the overall structure of the mind is working quite hard to increase satisfaction.
You can be suspicious of anyone saying that they know your subconscious reasons without being suspicious of someone who tells you your articulated reasons are of moderate importance.
Thanks for bringing this up—I think I understand somewhat more clearly what claim you are trying to make now. I agree that being suspicious of the first kind of statement does not necessarily entail being suspicious of the second kind of statement. Still, I find it necessary to be suspicious of both. I have a relative lack of knowledge in the field of psychology and neuroscience (although I greatly enjoyed the one psychology class I took in college). In order to determine whether another person is correct in their statements, I need to closely evaluate the available evidence for those statements. This includes claims made by journal articles, the logical train of thought used, simple things like day to day experiences, and any other available evidence. I can, of course, guess based on my current knowledge, but that would bias my decision towards information I already know.
We believe there are unintuited influences, we should not pretend that all the influences we understand are all that influence us.
How would giving more weight when there is evidence for a reason (whether consciously or unconsciously known for the subject) be the same as pretending that only the intuitive kind of reason influences us? I do not think this is the correct response to a statement about examining evidence. Things for which there are evidence are not necessarily intuitive in any way. That is why science is necessary in the first place. I think this would be a more valid response to a statement saying that anything unintuitive should automatically be given less weight. That was not what I said, however. In fact, I can give more weight to your statement about people choosing items on the right now that I see the evidence that this actually occurs.
I would expect people to tell themselves flattering stories...
Yes, I did see studies that say that confabulations are often positive , so I see that there is research to support for the idea that people would choose flattering stories for their conscious decisions. However, if most confabulations really are positive, does this mean conscious thought is usually used to come up with negative reasons? Or just that people usually don’t come up with negative reasons for things?
I hope that helps to clarify my current position on this matter. I appreciate the time you took to provide additional insight into your position. I’ll definitely be reading more about this kind of research on unconscious reasoning to try to better understand how people make decisions.
I still think this doesn’t always tell you any more useful information than the conscious reasons...a confabulation is not necessarily wrong
OK, so let’s say it tells you that the useful information that you get from your consciousness is only 10% (semi-random number) of relevant information. It’s not that it provides useful information to outweigh the conscious information, it just contextualizes it into being less important, even if it is most of the important information you have. So it should greatly reduce confidence, and affect decisions related to that.
Let’s say out of a group of 20 people you knew well, one was going to construct two teams to compete in an activity, say soccer. If I told you a random member of each team, you could predict which team would be more likely to win, but your confidence would be less than if I told you all the members on each team. This is so even though the information you know (one player per team) does more for you than that you don’t know (the players who are evenly distributed).
Let’s consider the right-side bias you presented. This is a good example because obviously nothing intrinsic to the clothing improves if you place it on someone’s right, and yet people overwhelmingly chose the item on the right (and they got the reason for this wrong). Yet I have questions about the applicability of this to everyday decisions. For example, how much stronger is this specific bias than conscious factors? If instead of being presented with identical items, the items are different, would this bias still be relevant?
It is certainly possible that when presented with nearly identical items, people prefer the one on the right, but when presented with very different items, they all else equal do not. It is also possible there are few such effects and they are swamped by conscious ones. However, I see no evidence the effect is limited to similar items, I think there are many such effects, and an analogy to natural selection is applicable—it hardly matters for a rabbit’s reproductive success whether it is a bit furrier or less furry than other rabbits, a bit bigger or a bit smaller, etc., but with many small effects occurring, the small effects add up.
Is this factor also based on research, or just a hypothetical scenario? Am I missing something obvious? I know of claims that colors affect emotion, but am unaware of claims that current emotions affect color choice
Based on research indicating that they effect emotion, I assume they probably effect choice absent having seen any study on point.
besides attempting to achieve satisfaction?
I was thinking primarily of things broadly categorizable as negative motivation—physical discomfort, emotional fear, self-sabotage to have an excuse for later failure, etc.
Still, I find it necessary to be suspicious of both. I have a relative lack of knowledge in the field of psychology and neuroscience...I need to closely evaluate the available evidence for those statements.
We apparently have very different priors. If basically “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, whereas subconscious processes would not have me conscious of them, I don’t consider my unawareness of them as extraordinary. Being convinced some occur, it is not hard to convince me that it’s likely various specific ones occur.
How would giving more weight when there is evidence for a reason
I’m trying to be meticulous about giving my knowns no more weight than necessary. If I am mapping 100 contiguous acres, and I know 10 acres have gardens, and know nothing about 90 acres, my estimate that the 90 unknown acres all have gardens is far less than 100%. If I am mapping an unknown number of acres, and I know 10 acres have gardens, and know nothing about the rest, my estimate that the unknown acres all have gardens is far less than 100%.
I consider the present search for subconscious influences to be far from exhaustive, and estimate there is much more out there. As is I consider the conscious influences to be pretty low. So regarding them, even if I know a lot more about them than anything else, when I consider the total of why I decided as I did, they are not predominantly important—it’s as if I knew one soccer player on each team, with each team having 5 to 50 players, that being unknown (but the same for each team). My prediction about who would win would be pretty much entirely based on the known player, but my confidence would be low because I know I have only a small proportion of the relevant information.
Upvoted for your thoughtful reply, which clarified a number of your points quite well. I will try to address some of your points and ask questions for those things I am still unclear on. Firstly, in your previous posts, it seems like you are discussing two separate issues—the first is the extent to which our decisions are based on external factors, the second is the extent to which our decisions are based on unconscious processing as opposed to conscious processing of those factors. Since your last post focused more on the second issue, this post will do so as well.
Here is what I did to analyze in more detail the position you are taking. I followed the link you supplied (this link being one of the reasons I upvoted your post—also, the use of the quote is very helpful to quickly establish relevance) and also used that page to get some information on the original source of the study mentioned. This led me to a paper by Nisbett and Wilson where this experiment is described by the original researchers. They also did a review of the literature to describe similar studies.
Reading Nisbett and Wilson’s paper changed my point of view on this subject since they discussed a variety of confabulation research in great detail. I would now agree that unconscious reasons can be an important component of understanding healthy decisions, although I still think this doesn’t always tell you any more useful information than the conscious reasons (specifically this may not always or even usually be the case where the conscious reason is correct, regardless of whether it is a confabulation). Their description of the 1931 experiment by Maier stood out especially for me, since it showed that healthy individuals could incorrectly explain how they knew the answer to a problem (as opposed to just saying that they don’t know how they figured it out). I’m not sure why I found this additional information more compelling than the more relevant clothing example. Maybe it helped to illustrate the more widespread existence of confabulation in cognition. I’ll have to think about this.
However, I think this paper outlined an important distinction, and that is that even when the reasons are correct, this doesn’t mean that they were discovered from introspection. Your link also discusses this concept of confabulation. However, a confabulation is not necessarily wrong (it is just necessarily not obtained from introspection). When the reasons are correct, they are still consciously known. It would be incorrect to say that they are not consciously known. It might be correct to say that the reasons for the reasons are not consciously known, but this is not quite the same thing.
I will now address some specific questions I have about the evidence you presented for your position. Let’s consider the right-side bias you presented. This is a good example because obviously nothing intrinsic to the clothing improves if you place it on someone’s right, and yet people overwhelmingly chose the item on the right (and they got the reason for this wrong). Yet I have questions about the applicability of this to everyday decisions. For example, how much stronger is this specific bias than conscious factors? If instead of being presented with identical items, the items are different, would this bias still be relevant?
For the other one involving color choice based on emotions felt at the time, I was not able to find any support. Is this factor also based on research, or just a hypothetical scenario? Am I missing something obvious? I know of claims that colors affect emotion, but am unaware of claims that current emotions affect color choice.
Okay. That makes sense to me, then.
True. It was an unfortunate typo on my part. I have since corrected the post above to reflect my actual meaning.
What do you mean by this? Can you give an example of what a person’s thought processes would be doing when making a decision (whether conscious or unconscious) besides attempting to achieve satisfaction? TheFreeDictionary.com states that satisfaction is ‘The fulfillment or gratification of a desire, need, or appetite.’ Maybe you mean that some of the ways the brain is wired to choose things do not actually fulfill this requirement, but are simply some sort of artifact of the wiring itself? For example, maybe this is true of the right-side preference you gave earlier. Nevertheless, if our minds have a component that positively justifies such seemingly irrelevant decisions through confabulation (ie. unconsciously making stuff up), it would seem that the overall structure of the mind is working quite hard to increase satisfaction.
Thanks for bringing this up—I think I understand somewhat more clearly what claim you are trying to make now. I agree that being suspicious of the first kind of statement does not necessarily entail being suspicious of the second kind of statement. Still, I find it necessary to be suspicious of both. I have a relative lack of knowledge in the field of psychology and neuroscience (although I greatly enjoyed the one psychology class I took in college). In order to determine whether another person is correct in their statements, I need to closely evaluate the available evidence for those statements. This includes claims made by journal articles, the logical train of thought used, simple things like day to day experiences, and any other available evidence. I can, of course, guess based on my current knowledge, but that would bias my decision towards information I already know.
How would giving more weight when there is evidence for a reason (whether consciously or unconsciously known for the subject) be the same as pretending that only the intuitive kind of reason influences us? I do not think this is the correct response to a statement about examining evidence. Things for which there are evidence are not necessarily intuitive in any way. That is why science is necessary in the first place. I think this would be a more valid response to a statement saying that anything unintuitive should automatically be given less weight. That was not what I said, however. In fact, I can give more weight to your statement about people choosing items on the right now that I see the evidence that this actually occurs.
Yes, I did see studies that say that confabulations are often positive , so I see that there is research to support for the idea that people would choose flattering stories for their conscious decisions. However, if most confabulations really are positive, does this mean conscious thought is usually used to come up with negative reasons? Or just that people usually don’t come up with negative reasons for things?
I hope that helps to clarify my current position on this matter. I appreciate the time you took to provide additional insight into your position. I’ll definitely be reading more about this kind of research on unconscious reasoning to try to better understand how people make decisions.
OK, so let’s say it tells you that the useful information that you get from your consciousness is only 10% (semi-random number) of relevant information. It’s not that it provides useful information to outweigh the conscious information, it just contextualizes it into being less important, even if it is most of the important information you have. So it should greatly reduce confidence, and affect decisions related to that.
Let’s say out of a group of 20 people you knew well, one was going to construct two teams to compete in an activity, say soccer. If I told you a random member of each team, you could predict which team would be more likely to win, but your confidence would be less than if I told you all the members on each team. This is so even though the information you know (one player per team) does more for you than that you don’t know (the players who are evenly distributed).
It is certainly possible that when presented with nearly identical items, people prefer the one on the right, but when presented with very different items, they all else equal do not. It is also possible there are few such effects and they are swamped by conscious ones. However, I see no evidence the effect is limited to similar items, I think there are many such effects, and an analogy to natural selection is applicable—it hardly matters for a rabbit’s reproductive success whether it is a bit furrier or less furry than other rabbits, a bit bigger or a bit smaller, etc., but with many small effects occurring, the small effects add up.
Based on research indicating that they effect emotion, I assume they probably effect choice absent having seen any study on point.
I was thinking primarily of things broadly categorizable as negative motivation—physical discomfort, emotional fear, self-sabotage to have an excuse for later failure, etc.
We apparently have very different priors. If basically “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, whereas subconscious processes would not have me conscious of them, I don’t consider my unawareness of them as extraordinary. Being convinced some occur, it is not hard to convince me that it’s likely various specific ones occur.
I’m trying to be meticulous about giving my knowns no more weight than necessary. If I am mapping 100 contiguous acres, and I know 10 acres have gardens, and know nothing about 90 acres, my estimate that the 90 unknown acres all have gardens is far less than 100%. If I am mapping an unknown number of acres, and I know 10 acres have gardens, and know nothing about the rest, my estimate that the unknown acres all have gardens is far less than 100%.
I consider the present search for subconscious influences to be far from exhaustive, and estimate there is much more out there. As is I consider the conscious influences to be pretty low. So regarding them, even if I know a lot more about them than anything else, when I consider the total of why I decided as I did, they are not predominantly important—it’s as if I knew one soccer player on each team, with each team having 5 to 50 players, that being unknown (but the same for each team). My prediction about who would win would be pretty much entirely based on the known player, but my confidence would be low because I know I have only a small proportion of the relevant information.