unreliable witness

"I claim that people make errors whenever they are provided with cues that would lead them to make a similar error about the thoughts of a third party. This suggests, I think, that they are using the same mental faculty for both (often now called the ‘mindreading’ faculty), relying upon the same sorts of cues. [...]

     People are completely unaware that they are always interpreting themselves in just the same way that they interpret others, however. Indeed, they think that they are directly introspecting their own thoughts. (I argue in my book, The Opacity of Mind, that there are reasons why the mindreading faculty should have been designed in such a way as to produce this illusion.) As a result, people will smoothly and unhesitatingly confabulate about their thoughts, telling of thoughts that we know they didn’t really have.
     For instance, in one study people were presented with pairs of pictures of female faces, and asked to pick the most attractive one. When they did so, the pictures were laid face down on the table for a moment, before the chosen picture was handed to subjects and they were asked to say why they had chosen it. However, in some trials, through the experimenter’s sleight of hand, the picture that they were then looking at was the one they had rejected, not the one they had chosen. The results were quite remarkable. First of all, hardly anyone noticed! Moreover, they went on to tell why they had chosen that picture, often citing factors that we can be quite sure were no part of the reason for their choice. (For example, saying, ‘I like her ear rings’, when the woman in the chosen picture hadn’t been wearing ear rings.) When people’s answers in the actual-choice and sleight-of-hand conditions were analyzed, the experimenters could discover no differences between the two. People’s reports had the same degree of emotional engagement, specificity, and so on, and were expressed with the same degree of confidence. I take this study, and many others like it, to show that people have no direct access to the factors that determine their liking for things."
— Peter Carruthers interviewed by Richard Marshall, 3 A.M. Magazine
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"So why do people misunderstand mirrors in this way? [Rebecca] Lawson said there are probably multiple reasons. One participant described her naive belief that whenever you turn your eyes towards a mirror, wherever it is, you will see yourself reflected in it - 'mirrors look back at you,' she said. No doubt this belief was held implicitly by many of the other participants.
    'Almost nobody will have a clear, thought-through and self-consistent theory of optics which they use to guide their predictions,' Lawson said. 'Most people probably use a set of underspecified beliefs and heuristics, some of which are incompatible, leading them to make unsophisticated, noisy and inaccurate predictions. People rarely think explicitly about optics and what determines what they can see in a mirror or a window - or indeed, what they can see directly.' "
— Research Digest

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