Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes
The document discusses the limitations of introspection in understanding cognitive processes, highlighting discrepancies between reported thoughts and actual mental mechanisms across various experiments and contexts.
home.csulb.eduYou do not automatically count the number of syllables of every word you read, but you can do it if you so choose. However, the control over intended computations is far from precise: we often compute much more than we want or need. I call this excess computation the mental shotgun. It is impossible to aim at a single point with a shotgun because i
... See moreSystem 1 is automatic and deeply influential, but it is susceptible to illusion, and you depend on System 2 to help you manage yourself: by checking your impulses, planning ahead, identifying choices, thinking through their implications, and staying in charge of your actions.
The sociologist George Herbert Meade called this “the interiorized other.” That is to say, we have a kind of interior picture, a vague sense of who we are, and of what the reaction of other people to us says about who we are. That reaction is almost invariably communicated to us through what other people say and think, but soon we learn to maintain
... See moreIf I say I am going to look into my mind but I don’t consider my assumptions, then the picture is wrong because the assumptions are looking. That is a common problem of introspection. You say, “I am going to look at myself inwardly,” but the assumptions are not looked at – the assumptions are looking.