Verbal reports about causal influences on social judgments: Private access vs. public theories.
Year: 1977
Type: article
Abstract: Female subjects were asked to make four judgments about a young woman after reading her "job application portfolio."Five characteristics of the young woman were manipulated orthogonally (e.g., physical appearance, academic credentials).Subjects were asked to report how each of the five manipulated factors had influenced each of their judgments."Observer subjects," who had access only to very impoverished descriptions of each of the five factors, were asked to predict how each of the factors would influence each of the judgments.Results showed that (a) subject reports about the effects of the factors on the judgments were in general highly inaccurate; (b) observer predictions were extremely similar to subject reports; (c) for the single judgment for which subjects showed substantial accuracy (a judgment about intelligence), observer predictions were as accurate as subject reports.The results indicate that whatever introspective access to cognitive processes may exist, it is not sufficient to produce generally accurate reports about such processes, nor even to produce reports that differ much from those of poorly informed outside observers.Reports about cognitive processes may be based less on introspection than on a priori causal theories about the effects of particular stimuli on particular responses.Nisbett and Wilson (1977) have argued recently that people may have little or no direct introspective access to complex mental processes such as those involved in judgment,
Authors: Nisbett, Richard E., Bellows, Nancy
Institutions: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4297956769