Introspection Illusion

The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly believe they have direct insight into the origins of their own mental states while treating other people's introspections as unreliable. It has been examined in psychological experiments and proposed as a basis for certain biases in how people compare themselves to others, with researchers interpreting the findings to suggest that introspection is less a matter of direct access to one's own mental processes than a process of construction and inference, much like the way people indirectly infer other people's mental states from their behavior. When people mistake this unreliable introspection for genuine self-knowledge, it can produce an illusion of superiority over others, as when each person in a group believes themselves to be less biased and less conformist than everyone else, and even when experimental subjects are given detailed reports of other people's introspections, they still rate those other introspections as unreliable while treating their own as trustworthy. In certain situations the illusion leads people to construct confident but false explanations of their own behavior, called causal theories, or to make inaccurate predictions about their own future mental states, though correction may be possible through education about the bias and its unconscious nature.