Many have assumed that self-knowledge begins with looking inward. But psychologist Nick Chater argues that this is impossible: the mind does not store beliefs and desires to be uncovered, it invents them on the spot. The brain is a brilliant improviser, coming up with explanations for our behaviour the instant we are asked for them. Shattering this illusion of inner depth exposes the therapeutic search for a “true self” as a futile pursuit, renders billion-dollar consumer surveys useless, and reveals that our demand for perfectly transparent AI is deeply misguided. The task of being human is not self-discovery, Chater suggests, but the creative act of self-authorship.
For millennia, people have tried not merely to look outward at the external world, but to turn inward and examine the workings of their own minds—as if there were an inner eye that could observe our mental life.
Yet a synthesis of decades of research in psychology and neuroscience shows that the very idea of introspection is an illusion. And for a surprising reason. It is not merely that we find it difficult to accurately perceive our inner motives, beliefs, principles, and desires (or that these are repressed, as Freud suggested). The problem is more fundamental: there are no such stable beliefs and desires “inside” us that can be observed and reported. Instead, the human mind is a wonderfully fluent, but profoundly deceptive, improviser: spinning stories justifying our thoughts and actions as fast as we ask questions. And these invented explanations are vague, inconsistent, and often provably wrong.
Consider, for example, the wonderfully clever experiments by Petter Johansson and Lars Hall and their colleagues at Lund University in Sweden. They gave people pairs of faces presented on cards and asked them to select their preferred face. They then handed people the card with their chosen face and asked them to explain their preference. On a small number of trials, however, by using close-up card magic, they tricked people by handing them the wrong card—the face they had not chosen.
In the great majority of cases, not only do people fail to notice the switch, but they happily and fluently justify the choice they didn’t actually make; and they do so just as confidently as for the choices they did make. If justifications came from introspection—looking inside our minds to discern the “true” explanation for our preferences, they would of course treat the two cases very differently—because when the cards were switched, the justification would make no sense. Yet not only do people not notice—they often explain their (apparent) choice with comments like “it’s those nice earrings” when the face they originally chose wasn’t even wearing earrings. The justifications must be mere rationalizations—improvisations fabricated in the moment they are asked for—rather than the product of genuine introspection.
Let’s extend that thought a little further. For most people, the areas of the brain concerned with language are primarily concentrated in the left hemisphere. Suppose, then, it were possible to give people a task that could only be carried out by the right hemisphere (without “telling” the left hemisphere what it was doing). In that case, the left hemisphere would have no way, in principle, of knowing—or introspecting—the true origin of the behaviour. But if our explanations of our own minds are no more than fluent fabrications, the left hemisphere should still be able to come up with some (wrong, but plausible) explanation for the right hemisphere’s choice.
