Nick Chater in iai:
For millennia, people have tried not merely to look outward at the external world, but to turn inward and examine the workings of their own minds—as if there were an inner eye that could observe our mental life.
Yet a synthesis of decades of research in psychology and neuroscience shows that the very idea of introspection is an illusion. And for a surprising reason. It is not merely that we find it difficult to accurately perceive our inner motives, beliefs, principles, and desires (or that these are repressed, as Freud suggested). The problem is more fundamental: there are no such stable beliefs and desires “inside” us that can be observed and reported. Instead, the human mind is a wonderfully fluent, but profoundly deceptive, improviser: spinning stories justifying our thoughts and actions as fast as we ask questions. And these invented explanations are vague, inconsistent, and often provably wrong.
Consider, for example, the wonderfully clever experiments by Petter Johansson and Lars Hall and their colleagues at Lund University in Sweden. They gave people pairs of faces presented on cards and asked them to select their preferred face. They then handed people the card with their chosen face and asked them to explain their preference. On a small number of trials, however, by using close-up card magic, they tricked people by handing them the wrong card—the face they had not chosen. In the great majority of cases, not only do people fail to notice the switch, but they happily and fluently justify the choice they didn’t actually make; and they do so just as confidently as for the choices they did make.
More here.
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