The research was no fluke—the scientists pulled a similar trick in a supermarket, with regard to shoppers’ preferences in taste tests of jam and tea.21 In the jam test, shoppers were asked which of two jams they preferred and were then supposedly given a second spoonful of the one they said they liked better so that they could analyze the reasons for their preference. But the jam jars had a hidden internal divider and a lid on both ends, allowing the deft researchers to dip the spoon into the nonpreferred jam for the second taste. Again, only about a third of the participants noticed the switch, while two-thirds had no difficulty explaining the reasons for their “preference.” A similar ruse, with a similar outcome, occurred in an experiment involving tea.
Sounds like a market researcher’s nightmare: ask people their opinion about a product or packaging to pick up insights about their appeal, and you get wonderful explanations that are sincere, detailed, and emphatic but happen to bear little relation to the truth. That’s also a problem for political pollsters who routinely ask people why they voted the way they did or why they will vote the way they plan to. It’s one thing when people claim to have no opinion, but quite another when you can’t even trust them to know what they think. Research, however, suggests that you can’t.22
The best hints as to what is going on come from research on people with brain abnormalities—for example, a series of famous studies on split-brain patients.23 Recall that information presented to one side of such a patient’s brain is not available to the other hemisphere. When the patient sees something on the left side of his visual field, only the right hemisphere of his brain is aware of it, and vice versa. Similarly, it is the right hemisphere alone that controls the movement of the left hand, and the left hemisphere alone that controls the right hand. One exception to this symmetry is that (in most people) the speech centers are located in the left hemisphere, and so if the patient speaks, it is usually the left hemisphere talking.
Taking advantage of this lack of communication between brain hemispheres, researchers instructed split-brain patients, via their right hemisphere, to perform a task and then asked their left hemisphere to explain why they’d done it. For example, the researchers instructed a patient, via his right hemisphere, to wave. Then they asked the patient why he’d waved. The left hemisphere had observed the waving but was unaware of the instruction to wave. Nevertheless, the left hemisphere did not allow the patient to admit ignorance. Instead, the patient said he’d waved because he’d thought he’d seen someone he knew. Similarly, when researchers instructed the patient, through the right hemisphere, to laugh and then asked him why he was laughing, the patient said he’d laughed because the researchers were funny. Again and again, the left hemisphere responded as if it knew the answer. In these and similar studies, the left brain generated many false reports, but the right brain did not, leading the researchers to speculate that the left hemisphere of the brain has a role that goes beyond simply registering and identifying our emotional feelings, to trying to understand them. It’s as though the left hemisphere has mounted a search for a sense of order and reason in the world in general.
Oliver Sacks wrote about a patient with Korsakoff’s syndrome, a type of amnesia in which victims can lose the ability to form new memories.24 Such patients may forget what is said within seconds, or what they see within minutes. Still, they often delude themselves into thinking that they know what is going on. When Sacks walked in to examine the patient, a Mr. Thompson, Thompson would not remember him from his previous encounters. But Thompson wouldn’t realize he didn’t know. He would always latch onto some available hint and convince himself that he did remember Sacks. On one occasion, since Sacks was wearing a white coat and Thompson had been a grocer, Thompson remembered him as the butcher from down the street. Moments later he forgot that “realization” and altered his story, remembering Sacks as a particular customer. Thompson’s understanding of his world, his situation, his self, was in a constant state of change, but he believed in each of the rapidly changing explanations he evolved in order to make sense of what he was seeing. As Sacks put it, Thompson “must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness.”
The term “confabulation” often signifies the replacement of a gap in one’s memory by a falsification that one believes to be true. But we also confabulate to fill in gaps in our knowledge about our feelings. We all have those tendencies. We ask ourselves or our friends questions like “Why do you drive that car?” or “Why do you like that guy?” or “Why did you laugh at that joke?” Research suggests that we think we know the answers to such questions, but really we often don’t. When asked to explain ourselves, we engage in a search for truth that may feel like a kind of introspection. But though we think we know what we are feeling, we often know neither the content nor the unconscious origins of that content. And so we come up with plausible explanations that are untrue or only partly accurate, and we believe them.25 Scientists who study such errors have noticed that they are not haphazard.26 They are regular and systematic. And they have their basis in a repository of social, emotional, and cultural information we all share.
IMAGINE YOU’RE BEING driven home from a cocktail party that was in the penthouse of a posh hotel. You remark that you had a lovely time, and your designated driver asks you what you liked about it. “The people,” you say. But did your joy really stem from the fascinating repartee with that woman who wrote the best seller about the virtues of a vegan diet? Or was it something far subtler, like the quality of the harp music? Or the scent of roses that filled the room? Or the expensive champagne you quaffed all night? If your response was not the result of true and accurate introspection, on what basis did you make it?
When you come up with an explanation for your feelings and behavior, your brain performs an action that would probably surprise you: it searches your mental database of cultural norms and picks something plausible. For example, in this case it might have looked up the entry “Why People Enjoy Parties” and chosen “the people” as the most likely hypothesis. That might sound like the lazy way, but studies suggest we take it: when asked how we felt, or will feel, we tend to reply with descriptions or predictions that conform to a set of standard reasons, expectations, and cultural and societal explanations for a given feeling.
If the picture I just painted is correct, there is an obvious consequence that can be tested by experiment. Accurate introspection makes use of our private knowledge of ourselves. Identifying a generic, social-and-cultural-norms explanation as the source of our feelings doesn’t. As a result, if we are truly in touch with our feelings, we should be able to make predictions about ourselves that are more accurate than predictions that others make about us; but if we merely rely on social norms to explain our feelings, outside observers should be just as accurate in predicting our feelings as we are, and ought to make precisely the same mistakes.
One context scientists used to examine this question is familiar to anyone involved in hiring.27 Hiring is difficult because it is an important decision, and it is hard to know someone from the limited exposure afforded by an interview and a résumé. If you’ve ever had to hire people, you might have asked yourself why you thought a particular individual was the right pick. No doubt you could always find justification, but in hindsight, are you sure you chose that person for the reasons you thought you did? Perhaps your reasoning went the other way—you got a feeling about someone, formed a preference, and then, retroactively, your unconscious employed social norms to explain your feelings about that person.