Timothy D . Wilson Knowing When To Ask Introspection and the Adaptive Unconscious

The introspective method has come under attack throughout the history of psychology, yet it is widely used today in virtually all areas of the field, often to good effect. At the same time indirect methods that do not rely on introspection are widely used, also to good effect. This conundrum is best understood in terms of models of nonconscious processing and the role of consciousness. People have access to many of their feelings and emotions, and develop rich narratives about themselves and their social worlds. These conscious states, accessible to introspective reports, are often good predictors of people’s behaviour. There is also a pervasive adaptive unconscious that is inaccessible via introspection. When using introspective reports researchers should be clear about which kinds of mental states they are trying to measure. The introspective method has come under repeated attack from the time psychology began as an empirical science to the present day (Jack and Roepstorff, 2002; Lieberman, 1979; Nisbett and Wilson, 1977), yet the method is alive and well in virtually all areas of the field. How can a method that is so widely used be so maligned? To understand this conundrum, we need to ask what people are doing when they introspect and what they are accessing. By developing clearer ideas about the limits of people’s ability to access their cognitive and emotional processes we will know better what to ask people to report and what is better left unasked. Introspective Reports are Alive and Well A broad examination of psychological research — not just in cognitive psychology — reveals that researchers continue to put introspective reports to good use. A casual perusal of journals in virtually all subdisciplines of the field reveals many dependent measures in which participants are asked to report their internal states, and in each of these fields there is evidence for the validity of these reports. Consider these examples: Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, No. 9–10, 2003, pp. ??–?? Correspondence: Dr. Timothy D. Wilson, Dept. of Psychology, 102 Gilmer Hall, PO Box 400400, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA. Email: [email protected] Personality research Personality researchers have long relied on self-report inventories in which people rate their own traits. Some of these measures are quite direct and transparent, such as a recent measure of the ‘big five’ personality domains by Gosling, Rentfrow and Swann (2002), in which people rate their level of agreement with statements such as, ‘I see myself as extraverted, enthusiastic’ and ‘I see myself as calm, emotionally stable’. The predictive validity of self-report measures of personality has been controversial for many years. No one doubts that there are correlations between such measures and actual behaviour, though there is much debate over the magnitude of these correlations (e.g. Epstein, 1979; Mischel, 1968; Ross and Nisbett, 1991). Recent evidence suggests that self-report measures are especially likely to predict behaviours that are under people’s conscious control, as opposed to more spontaneous, uncontrollable behaviours (e.g. Asendorpf et al., 2002).