Richard Nisbett

Who they are

Nisbett's 1977 paper with Timothy Wilson in Psychological Review is among the most cited in psychology, and the version that circulates is cruder than the paper.

Its claim has three parts: people are sometimes unaware of an influential stimulus, sometimes unaware of their own response, and sometimes unaware that the stimulus affected the response. Its explanation is that reports on mental processes are generated from a priori implicit causal theories rather than retrieved by introspection.

And it states its own boundary, which is the part usually dropped. Accurate reports do occur, where the influential stimulus is salient and is a plausible cause of the response, and fail where it is neither.

Key papers

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). "Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes." Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259. First author.

Key ideas

Reports are constructed from theories of plausible causation, not read off a process. See Introspection Illusion.

The boundary makes it usable: ask about the obvious and the answer is probably fine, ask about the subtle and the answer is a theory. See The Self-Report Problem.

This record treats the paper as a review of its moment rather than as the current consensus, which it has not checked.

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