Preliminary Comments Designed to Suspend
The Introspection Controversy
An excerpt from Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience
by
Russell T. Hurlburt
published by
Plenum Press

This book describes in detail people's inner experiences; shows how schizophrenia may be more a disorganization of inner images than of association; and suggests that depression may be due to lack of words and images in the thinking process rather than to negative self-thoughts. These observations are based on a new method of eliciting careful self-reports of inner experience, which some readers may unfortunately characterize as "introspective" and then dismiss because they accept the conclusion that accurate introspection is impossible. This introductory section shows such skeptical readers that the present study is different from, and quite possibly much better than, pervious studies that have been labeled introspective.

See...
The debate over the validity of verbal reports
Nisbett and Wilson's position
Hurlburt's critique
Ericsson and Simon's position
Hurlburt's critique
The most accurate verbal reports are about moments
References

See also Table of Contents

All these texts are from Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience by R. T. Hurlburt. Copyright c 1990 by Plenum Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher, Plenum Press, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013.



































The debate over the validity of verbal reports

We will take the "Nisbett and Wilson versus Ericsson and Simon debate regarding the validity of verbal reports" (Grover, 1982, p. 205) as typical of the present polarized positions on introspection. Nisbett and Wilson (1977) argued against the possibility of accurate introspection, concluding that "the evidence reviewed is then consistent with the most pessimistic view concerning people's ability to report accurately about their cognitive processes" (p. 247), and ". . . there is by now enough evidence discrediting introspective reports to allow us to ignore any argument based on introspection" (p. 255). On the other hand, Ericsson and Simon (1984) argued in favor: "It is now time for verbal reports to reassume their position as a rich source of data, combinable with other data, that can be of the greatest value in providing an integrated and full account of cognitive processes and structures" (p. 373). We will comment on both positions in turn.

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Nisbett and Wilson's position

Nisbett and Wilson's (1977) article cited a wide variety of reports, mostly from the social psychology literature on cognitive dissonance and attribution theory, where subjects were unable to describe accurately their own inner processes. We will summarize two of these studies here to give a typical flavor of the kinds that Nisbett and Wilson reviewed.

In our first example, Bem and McConnell (1970) asked each subject in an experimental group to write an essay that took a position in opposition to their own opinion on a topic. Subjects in a control group wrote no such counter-attitudinal essay. Comparisons between the groups showed that the subjects in the experimental group had changed their attitudes as a result of writing the counter-attitudinal essay, a result typical of the cognitive dissonance literature. However, Bem and McConnell found that none of the individual subjects in the experimental group detected any change in their own attitude. Nisbett and Wilson concluded, "Thus subjects apparently changed their attitudes in the absence of any subjective experience of change" (p. 236).

In our second example, Storms and Nisbett (1970) gave insomniac subjects in an experimental group placebo pills to take before bedtime, with a deceptive explanation that the pills would cause breathing irregularities, rapid heart rate, etc.-in short, the symptoms of insomnia. The subjects then reported the amount of time necessary to fall asleep on a series of nights. As expected, the subjects reported getting to sleep faster on the nights they took placebo pills. At the conclusion of their participation in the study, subjects were asked to explain their ability to get to sleep faster on the nights they took the pills. None of the subjects thought that the pill had affected their ability to sleep; they gave instead a variety of plausible but incorrect explanations. As Nisbett and Wilson summarized, "the explanations that subjects offer for their behavior in [these] experiments are so removed from the process that investigators presume to have occurred as to give grounds for considerable doubt that there is direct access to these processes' (p. 238).

After reviewing these two and many other studies, Nisbett and Wilson concluded: "In summary, it would appear that people may have little ability to report accurately on their cognitive processes" (p. 246).

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Hurlburt's critique of Nisbett and Wilson's position

Our own evaluation of Nisbett and Wilson's conclusion is that it is too broad: Nisbett and Wilson reviewed studies in the insufficient-justification, attribution, subliminal perception, and creativity paradigms and found in those paradigms that subjects were unable to report accurately their cognitive processes. However, the cognitive processes associated with these paradigms are but a subset of the total category "cognitive processes"; so Nisbett and Wilson's conclusion is an overgeneralization from their review. Perhaps a better summary statement would have been that people have little ability to report accurately on some (or even many) of their cognitive processes.

Nisbett and Wilson were aware that their review did not allow complete generalization: "We also wish to acknowledge that the studies do not suffice to show that people could never be accurate about the processes involved. To do so would require ecologically meaningless but theoretically interesting procedures such as interrupting a process at the very moment it was occurring, alerting subjects to pay careful attention to their cognitive processes, coaching them in introspective procedures and so on" (p. 246, italics in original).

The method that we are using in the present book satisfies all three of these requirements: it does interrupt processes at the moment they occur; it does alert subjects to pay careful attention to their cognitive processes, and it does coach them on the procedures. There are thus two conclusions, to be drawn: First, it would seem that Nisbett and Wilson rather specifically exempted our present method from their sweeping anti-introspection generalization because it meets the three requirements stated above; second, Nisbett and Wilson specifically acknowledged that a study that meets their three requirements (as does ours) could provide accurate reports about cognitive processes. (As an aside, we have no idea why Nisbett and Wilson would consider such a method to be "ecologically meaningless.")

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Ericsson and Simon's position

Ericsson and Simon (1984) provided an opposing position to that of Nisbett and Wilson, and concluded that verbal reports of cognitive processes are deserving of a prominent place in cognitive science. Their argument can be summarized as follows. It is commonly understood that verbal reports have for much of this century been excluded from scientific psychology; but this view rests on the mistaken assumption that yes/no responses or response latencies, which have been acceptable to psychology, are not themselves types of verbal response. Once we recognize that such responses are in fact verbal responses, then the question becomes not whether verbal responses should be accepted but rather under what circumstances they should be accepted. Ericsson and Simon then present an information-processing model of cognition to evaluate which kinds of verbal reports are likely to be accurate.

Their information-processing model predicts that
...two forms of verbal reports can claim to being the closest reflection of the cognitive processes. Foremost are concurrent verbal reports-'talk aloud' and 'think aloud' reports-where the cognitive process ... are verbalized directly...We claim that cognitive processes are not modified by these verbal reports.... [The] second type is the retrospective report." (p.16, italics in original)

In the ideal case the retrospective report is given by the subject immediately after the task is completed while much information is still in STM [short-term memory] and can be directly reported or used as retrieval cues.... In this particular case, the subject will still retain the necessary retrieval cues in STM when a general instruction is given "to report everything you can remember about your thoughts during the last problem." This form of retrospective verbal report should give us the closest approximation to the actual memory structures. (p.19)
Thus, Ericsson and Simon's model predicts that there are two kinds of "ideal" verbal reports: concurrent (think-aloud) reports and retrospective reports given immediately. We will evaluate each in turn by asking whether Ericsson and Simon could possibly have considered our kind of data when arriving at their ideals.

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Hurlburt's critique of Ericsson and Simon's position

Ericsson and Simon's model predicts that there are two kinds of "ideal" verbal reports: concurrent (think-aloud) reports and retrospective reports given immediately. We will evaluate each in turn by asking whether Ericsson and Simon could possibly have considered our kind of data when arriving at their ideals.

First, Ericsson and Simon claimed that think-aloud reports are the "closest reflection" of cognitive processes, and that these "cognitive processes are not modified by" the think-aloud procedures. The richness of our own data, as will be seen, makes it impossible for us to accept such claims. It is premature to summarize all of our results (see Chapters 10 and 15), but a few observations will make evident why thinking aloud cannot possibly accurately reflect inner experience as our subjects described it.

First, our subjects may take as long as 30 minutes to describe a one-second experience, indicating that the nuances of experience do not translate easily into words. Second, our subjects frequently report multiple simultaneous cognitive processes: visual images simultaneous with words, etc. Third, verbal thoughts themselves are not experienced simply as "strings of phonemes," as Ericsson and Simon stated (p.63), but are instead complex processes, where, for example, the rhythm of a phoneme sequence may be present but the phonemes themselves absent. Fourth, inner verbal experience sometimes involves visual representations of the words simultaneous with their phonetic utterance, and the simultaneous visualized works may be different from the internally spoken words.

We will cite other examples in Chapters 15 and 16, but the conclusion is clear: Thinking aloud cannot provide an adequate rendering even of inner verbal experience, much less of inner cognitive experience in general. Thinking aloud is at best only a one-dimensional representation of a process that is multidimensional. That Ericsson and Simon could make the claim that thinking aloud represents the "closest reflection" of cognitive processes, and that "cognitive processes are not modified by [thinking aloud] verbal reports," indicates to us that they must not have included our kind of data in their analysis.

Ericsson and Simon's second "ideal case [is] the retrospective report given by the subject immediately after the task is completed while much information is still in STM" (p.19). Now it happens that our own method of thought sampling asks for "reports on the immediately preceding cognitive activity," and so seems to qualify as an "ideal case" under Ericsson and Simon's analysis. But a further analysis shows that our subjects may have better access to their cognitions than did any of the subjects in the studies reviewed by Ericsson and Simon. Consider Ericsson and Simon's above-quoted "ideal... retrospective... instruction. 'Report everything you can remember about your thoughts during the last problem' " (p.19). According to Ericsson and Simon, this is an "ideal case" because the retrieval cues are present in STM when the general instruction is given. The thoughts themselves which the subjects are to recall are clearly not in STM, because the problem during which the thoughts occurred may have required several minutes to complete.

By contrast, we will see that in our own study subjects were trained to use a clear, unambiguous beep as a signal to report everything they can about their experience that was occurring at the moment of that same beep. Thus, the entire experience which our subjects were to describe, not merely the retrieval cues, has just occurred when the subject begins to report, and so it would appear that our own subjects' reports may be better, perhaps much better than the "retrospective ideal" described by Ericsson and Simon.

We conclude our review of Ericsson and Simon's analysis with a summary of our two conclusions: First, Ericsson and Simon were not including studies such as ours in their analysis; and second, a study such as ours may provide even more accurate data on cognition than Ericsson and Simon's "ideal" study.

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The most accurate verbal reports are about moments

We formed two conclusions regarding Ericsson and Simon's review: they were not including studies such as ours in their analysis; and second, a study such as ours may provide even more accurate data on cognition than their "ideal" study.

We reached essentially the same two conclusions when reviewing Nisbett and Wilson's analysis as we did when reviewing Ericsson and Simon's. That may seem surprising given that Nisbett and Wilson and Ericsson and Simon are seen to be on opposing sides of the introspection debate. The explanation for the similarity of conclusion is that both Nisbett and Wilson and Ericsson and Simon were interested in the same kinds of verbal reports. Ericsson and Simon were more supportive of introspection because their information-processing model identifies some cognitions as being more accessible than others. For example, an introspection of a cognition that demands a search of long-term memory but provides inadequate retrieval cues is more difficult than an immediate retrospection (the "ideal" discussed above) where the retrieval cues are already present in short-term memory. Thus Ericsson and Simon supported the adequacy of some verbal reports because they identify some introspective tasks as easier than others.

We have seen that neither Ericsson and Simon nor Nisbett and Wilson directly considered the detailed descriptions of moments of inner experience such as are provided in the present book, and we have shown that such descriptions may provide a more accurate view of cognition than any of the studies called "introspective" by either Nisbett and Wilson or Ericsson and Simon. The present book explores that possibility of accurate reporting of cognition by instructing our subjects to "describe what you experience at this particular moment." We do not ask them to explain why they are having that particular experience. We do not ask them to tell us what particular environmental events are responsible for that experience. In fact, we do not even ask them to tell us whether that experience is typical for them or not.

In short, we ask them to report only those experiences for which they have direct (not inferred) access: We simply ask them to describe what they are aware of at some particular moment in time, and at that particular moment when the experience is as fresh as it can possibly be. No introspective study has used a method like this, and we have seen that there is reason to believe that such a method may produce relatively accurate descriptions of inner experience.

Of course, the fact that Nisbett and Wilson and Ericsson and Simon can be interpreted as supporting the possible existence of a method of accurate introspection does not make the present method necessarily accurate. The present study can be viewed as a test of the premise that subjects can give accurate responses to our simple descriptive request. We ask that the reader suspend for the moment any biases about introspection and decide for him or herself whether this study provides accurate, useful descriptions of inner experience, evaluating this study on its own merits rather than on preexisting beliefs about introspection.

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References

Bem, D.J., & McConnell, H.K. (1970). Testing the self-perception explanation of dissonance phenomena: On the salience of premanipulation attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 14, 23-31.

Ericsson, K.A. & Simon, H.A. (1984). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Grover, S.C. (1982). A re-evaluation of the introspection controversy: Additional considerations. The Journal of General Psychology, 106, 205-212.

Nisbett, R.E., & Wilson, T.D. (1977). Telling more than we know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.

Storms, M.D,. & Nisbett, R.E. (9170). Insomnia and the attribution process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2, 319-328.

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