Index Errans

person in Black box

1941

Richard E. Nisbett

ConfabulationPost-hoc rationalisation

in Black box

Richard E. Nisbett (b. 1941), American social psychologist. At the University of Michigan, in the Research Center for Group Dynamics, when he and Timothy Wilson published "Telling More Than We Can Know" (Psychological Review, 1977). He became a major figure in social cognition and the psychology of judgment, later known for cross-cultural work in The Geography of Thought.

Stake§

Scientific and reputational — a deliberately provocative challenge to the standing of verbal self-report as psychological data, with immediate methodological consequences for any research that asks people why they did things. No commercial or ideological interest.

Nisbett's contribution to this topic, with Wilson, is the confabulation finding. Reviewing studies in which people confidently explained choices whose real cause the design showed they never noticed, he and Wilson argued that people have little introspective access to their higher cognition and report a priori causal theories in place of it — the structure of confabulation and post-hoc rationalisation. It is the empirical content behind Lipton's aside that humans and machines may both explain by a route separate from how they decide, and the human precedent for Turpin's unfaithful machine explanations.

Works in this corpus§

their concepts on the territory
ConfabulationConfabulation Post-hoc rationalisationPost-hoc rationalisation

2 concepts in this scholar's webopen the full territory →

excerpts

Evidence is reviewed which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes.
— Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes (1977)

The sentence that founded the [[concept:confabulation|confabulation]] literature: people cannot watch their own higher cognition happen. Whatever they report about why they did something is produced by some other route than looking inward.

on Confabulation

It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response.
— Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes (1977)

The mechanism: a verbal report is a plausible story assembled from folk theories of cause, not a readout of the process it claims to describe. This is the exact structure [[source:turpin-2023-language-models-dont-always-say-what-they-think|Turpin]] finds in a language model's chain of thought — a plausible account that need not match the real cause.

on Post-hoc rationalisation, Confabulation

⤺ mentioned in

articles