Valuing thoughts, ignoring behavior: The introspection illusion as a source of the bias blind spot

“People often fail to recognize that while they do have access to their mental contents, they do not have access to the mental processes that underlie those contents and therefore to whether those processes involve bias (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977a).”

“These included the eVects of nonconscious cues on bystander intervention ( Darley & Latane, 1968; Darley, Teger, & Lewis, 1973), interpersonal rudeness (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), achievement at a verbal task (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001), cooperation vs. competition in a prisoner’s…”

“Intervention 9: The phenomenon known as the " bias blind spot " (Pronin & Kugler, 2007) reflects people's beliefs that they are objective and impartial and are immune to biased judgments.”

“Invisible sources of influence can be harder to defend against (67–69), and for people who are impressionable, invisible sources of influence not only persuade, they also leave people feeling that they made up their own minds— that no external force was applied (70, 71).”

“It is likewise with self-assessment based on introspective information, rather than behavioral information (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“Research on the topic of bias blindspot suggests that the self–other asymmetry in social perception is partially driven by attaching greater credibility to one’s ability to gain insights when reflecting on the self (cf. introspection illusion; Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“For example, although the self has privileged access to mental states (e.g., thoughts, feelings, intentions), recent research suggests that this may in fact impair the accuracy of self-perceptions, for example by leading people to construct false reasons for their behavior (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Bargh & Williams, 2…”

“People tend to place a great deal of trust in their introspections, but generating explanations for one’s tendencies seems to make self-perceptions less accurate (Pronin, 2009; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Silvia & Gendolla, 2001; Wilson, 2002; Wilson & Dunn, 2004; Wilson & LaFleur, 1995).”

“In general, people are confident about all kinds of self-knowledge, such as identifying factors that influence their decision making and knowledge of certain traits and characteristics, but they are often incorrect (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Wilson, 2002).”

“Prior literature has shown that introspecting one’s own behaviour can have interesting effects on one’s thinking and subsequent actual behaviour (Pronin and Kugler 2007).”

“Taken together, this research suggests that self-perceptions of objectivity increase people’s faith in the validity of their beliefs and thoughts, and perhaps even in the validity of their feelings and intuitions (cf. Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“Rational models of cognition often fail to capture the reality of human choice and behavior (Kah-neman, 2003; Kahneman & Klein, 2009), and people fail to acknowledge their own biases due to a tendency to overvalue introspective information in themselves but not in others (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“The bias blind spot has been attributed to the interplay of two phenomena: the introspection illusion and naïve realism (Pronin et al. 2004, Pronin and Kugler 2007).”

“Social psychologists have long known that people have difficulty discerning the causes of their own behavior (e.g., Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Pronin & Kugler, 2007) and, moreover, tend to avoid reporting attitudes frowned upon by society (e.g., Block, 1965; Goldstein, 1960; Marlow & Crowne, 1961).”

“For instance, exposing employees to information about noteworthy female innovators and, thus, eliminating their “blind spot” on this issue, may help attenuate the male-innovator association (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“@The existence of deeply seated cognitive biases that cannot be eliminated or ought not be globally corrected is an important and plausible adjunct hypothesis to this account of SP, and indeed there are good reasons to think that just such pre-existing tendencies do exist. For example, our amply demonstrated tendencie…”

“The present results and this view of the actor–observer bias are consistent with research on the introspection illusion (18, 34, 35), which entails people’s tendency to view their own motives, intentions, and desires as the key to understanding their actions (a tendency not shown in the case of others).”

“Importantly, a wide body of research indicates that people view themselves as less susceptible than others to a host of cognitive and motivational biases, a phenomenon known as the bias blind spot (Pronin, 2006, 2008; Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004; Pronin & Kugler, 2006).”

“…into their cognition than they actually do; that is, people confidently report what influenced their decisions, how their attitudes have changed, or what they have learned, but these “introspections” are often incorrect (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Ross, 1989; Wilson, 2002).”

“The accuracy of self-reports of behavior—even in-the-moment self-reports—is an empirical question with mixed empirical evidence (Gosling, John, Craik, & Robins, 1998; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Schwarz, 2012).”

“…test has demonstrated that individuals’ evaluations of this test are self-servingly biased such that individuals who believe that they have performed poorly evaluate the test more negatively than individuals who believe they have performed well (Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Pronin et al., 2002).”

“Other putative advantages of such informant reports include minimizing certain memory errors or biases in self-reports (Pronin & Kugler, 2007), and incorporating a vantage point external to that of the self (Kolar et al., 1996).”

“Research in social psychology (e.g., Pronin & Kugler, 2007) suggests that attitude change may require an awareness and understanding of the cognitive structures and biases which underlie our beliefs, thus supporting the need for educators and trainers to attend to awareness and knowledge.”

“However, surprisingly, an individual can be oblivious to the consequences of these interwoven effects as a consequence of “bias blind spot” (43).”

“…measures so valuable.31 Moreover, recent studies indicate that such a motivation has a role in sustaining our view of ourselves as immune to bias: Pronin and Kugler (2007) found individuals to over-rely on on misleading introspective evidence of propensity to bias (introspection revealing –…”

“Finally, advanced organizers could be used to help trainees realize their own biases, thereby reducing bias blind spots (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“Psychologists have long questioned people’s ability to make accurate judgments about themselves (e.g., Gilbert, 2007; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Wilson, 2002); that is, people generally think they know what will make them happy, why they decided on a certain course of action,…”

“But in self-judgment about bias, we overlook our actions and instead cling to how things feel on the inside (Pronin and Kugler 2007).”

“More generally, introspection may work when people pay attention to subtle cues (Wilson, 2003; Hofmann and Wilson, 2010), or are educated about the common pitfalls and biases associated with introspection (Pronin and Kugler, 2007).”

“Indeed, the ignorance of contextual effects is a recognized psychological phenomenon in itself and has been termed the ‘‘bias blind spot’’ (3).”

“This dimension of cognitive biases is explained by a phenomenon called the bias blind spot, extensively researched by Emily Pronin (2007; Pronin and Kugler 2007; Pronin, Lin, and Ross 2002; Pronin, Gilovich, and Ross 2004) and helpfully summarized by Nathan Ballantyne (2015).”

“Via an essay task, observers were given more direct access to others’ internal states by reading about their first-hand, full experience in either changing or staying the same (see Pronin & Kugler, 2007, Study 3, for a conceptually similar method).”

“We over-rely on our introspections, considering the more objective, behavioral facts as secondary (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“Failing to detect it, they conclude that they are largely or entirely unbiased (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“…thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors led them to be less affected by these specific biases in their judgments and decision-making (see, for example, Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Rand, 2003; Schul, 1993).1 Hence, we hypothesized that raising awareness to naïve realism and addressing its implications and…”

“Given this perceived access to objective truth, people tend to believe that others will share the same impression and that divergent perceptions stem from being uninformed, unreasonable, or biased (Pronin et al., 2004; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; L. Ross & Ward, 1996).”

“In general, people are confident about all kinds of self-knowledge, such as knowledge of their own traits and characteristics and their ability to identify factors that influenced their decision making, but their views are often erroneous (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Pronin and Kugler, 2007; Wilson, 2002).”

“It might also help with related effects, such as the introspective illusion, in which people overestimate the accuracy of their thoughts (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“BBS stems from the unconscious tendency to value one's knowledge, experiences, and introspections over the knowledge, experiences, and introspections of others (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“A possible explanation may be that people believe that they have insight into their own mental state, but consider other people ’ s introspections to be untrustworthy (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“Research on biases leaves no doubt that cognitive biases operate automatically, outside of awareness, and they cannot be avoided simply through introspection and conscious effort (Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“…consistent with research suggesting that people generally believe what other people say (Gilbert, 1991; Zuckerman, Koestner, & Alton, 1984) but also that people assume that their own insight into their own knowledge and abilities is better (Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Spellman, Tenney, & Scalia, 2010).”

“…the degree of other people’s overconfidence).24 This result is consistent with a large literature in psychology on the ‘blind spot bias’, where subjects believe behavioural biases to be stronger in others than in themselves (Ehrlinger et al., 2005; Pronin and Kugler, 2007; Pronin et al., 2007).”

“More recent work has demonstrated that people not only have more access to their own thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions but also place more weight on that sort of information when making self-judgments (Kruger & Gilovich, 2004; Pronin, Berger, & Molouki, 2007; Pronin & Kugler, 2007 ).”

“This inappropriate reliance on information gained by looking inward constitutes an introspection illusion (e.g., Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“…on the bias blind spot in community and student samples, this sample of forensic mental health professionals demonstrated a propensity to rate themselves as less biased than their peers and colleagues (Frantz, 2006; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Pronin et al., 2002; West, Meserve, & Stanovich, 2012).”

“…know their own desires and intentions, they know their goals and aspirations (Andersen & Ross, 1984; Johnson, 2009; Pronin, Berger, & Molouki, 2007; Pronin & Kugler, 2007), and they are aware of situational constraints and random events that might have prevented them from realizing their potential…”

“Furthermore, we tend to recognize biases and motivated reasoning more readily in others than we do in ourselves [23,48 – 50].”

“Bias turns out to be relatively easy to recognize in others but more difficult to detect in one’s own judgments (Pronin & Kugler, 2007; Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002).”

“Third, in previous studies of perceptions of bias in self versus others, participants were typically asked to estimate the degree to which the judgments of others or their own might be influenced by bias, or to make explicit self-to-other comparisons on susceptibility to bias [22, 23].”

“Most typically, making people aware of the truth by enhancing their cognitive skills (Kruger & Dunning, 1999) and helping them identify factors that can lead to bias (Pronin & Kugler, 2007) have been shown to diminish these errors.”

“…the culture mixing is judged based on factual observation instead of motivational inference, the self–other asymmetry will be reduced because judgment based on the explicit facts is less involved in the introspection information related to one’s or others’ internal states (Pronin & Kugler, 2007).”

“For example, reading a supposed Science article describing the breadth of psychological research on how nonconscious processes influence judgments eliminated the bias blind spot – individuals’ tendency to perceive themselves to be much less susceptible than other people to various cognitive biases [21].”