What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds
Classic psychology studies show just how little access we have to the workings of our own minds.
Ever wondered where your opinions come from, how you manage to be creative, or how you solve problems? Well, don't bother. Psychology studies examining these areas and more have found that while we're good at inventing plausible explanations, these explanations are frequently completely made-up.
In this series of posts, I examine some of the classic findings in psychology that show we have precious little insight into our own thought processes.
How do great artists create? How do brilliant scientists solve the hardest problems in their field? Listen to them try to explain and you'll probably be disappointed. Artists say mysterious things like: "The picture just formed in my mind." Writers tell us that: "I don't know where the words come from." Scientists say they: "Just had a hunch."
» Read on about the hidden workings of our minds -»
When you change your attitude about something, do you know why? Psychologists have argued that the inner workings of our minds are largely hidden away from us. One aspect of this is the surprising finding that people are often unaware when they have changed their attitudes.
» Read on about our secret attitude changes -»
The process of human creativity is both fascinating and, at the same time, mystifying. Understanding the mental processes of great thinkers offers an enormous reward to any who can replicate them: immortality. Perhaps if we really understood what was going through their minds, we too could create an object or idea that would live long after our deaths
» Read on about why problem solving is a puzzle -»
Here are four everyday situations - shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people - and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what's really going on in our minds.
» Read on about shopping, reading, watching TV and judging people -»
Are the mistakes we make about our own thought processes systematic in any way? Nisbett and Wilson (1977) provide five factors likely to have a huge effect on how accurately we report our own higher mental processes. These give us useful clues about when we're most likely to be fooling ourselves.
» Read on about when we are fools to ourselves -»
Across a crowded room your eyes lock with an attractive stranger. You look away, you look back. The first hint of a smile plays across their lips. Suddenly you're nervous, your mind goes blank, you want to go over and you want to run away, both at the same time. You turn around too fast, bump into someone, almost spilling your drink. 'Wow,' you think as you recover, 'Now, that's what I'm talking about!'.
» Read on about choice blindness -»
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Having explored the average person's innate capacity for self-knowledge, to what degree can this be improved with training?
I find your website intruiging. I have carried out a survey on the internet on the psychologies of every day life: such as whether love is entwined with hate, money cannot buy you happiness but you have to pay the price and you don't have to use a revolver to have a revolution. I had some enlightening answers. Could you assess it or have it assessed for me?
Chris, that's a very good question to which I don't know the answer. I wonder if any research has been done on this?
Anon, probably best to email me directly about this.
I find this area very interesting. Some of this stuff I knew about already, some was new, and it was great to have it all summarized together.
I am a psychologist working in an applied area, that of software usability. I'm suspicious of some of the ways that software usability is assessed because of the research you describe. However, sometimes it's a hard sell, unfortunately.
Hi Paddy, glad it's useful. Presumably you need to focus on behavioural studies to get the data on usability rather than asking people directly?
Jeremy,
Yes, behavioural studies are preferable, but sometimes things get in the way:
- Not everyone working in this field knows how to set up a proper behavioral study
- Some differences we're interested in are too subtle for the sensitivity of the testing we can reasonably do
- Resource limitations
Unfortunately this means that people fall back on verbal data, with the assumption that it's "better than nothing"...
Paddy
It's ironic, really, that all the efforts of modern psychology have only uncovered what the wisest philosophers knew already. "We know nothing of ourselves, we knowers", said Nietzsche. Precisely.
On other matters - nice blog. You might be interested in these links:
http://reheated.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/inside-homers-brain/
http://mtblog.typepad.com/mt_blog/2008/01/a-great-thing-a.html
I also find this very interesting. I agree with what reheated said, all the efforts of modern psychology have only uncovered what the wisest philosophers knew already. I think people hang on every word of what people tell them and if more people were to read into things like this for example they would be better off.
Thanks for the good info
Thank you for posting this article. I also try hard to work on understanding the brain as much as humanly possible and this article helps tremendously. My appreciation to you is in the highest sense.
To show you my gratitude I would like to share with you a post I found that also helps with this: http://consciousflex.blogspot.com/2008/01/your-brain-does-not-know-difference-by.html
Thank you indeed. I hope it helps you and others who read this as much as this post of yours as helped, please keep up the incredible work in helping others!