Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes
Nisbett and Timothy Wilson reviewed the evidence on whether people can report on their own mental processes, in Psychological Review. It is a review of a literature rather than an experiment, so it has no sample of its own. The finding has three parts. People are sometimes unaware of a stimulus that importantly influenced their response, sometimes unaware of the response itself, and sometimes unaware that the stimulus affected the response at all. The explanation is the part that gets dropped. When people account for the process connecting a stimulus to their behaviour, they are not reading off an internal record, they are drawing on implicit causal theories about whether a given thing is a plausible cause of a given response. The paper also states the condition under which reports are accurate, which is that the influential stimulus is salient and is a plausible cause, and that condition is what most summaries lose. On standing, this is one of the most cited papers in psychology and it has been substantially qualified since. It is routinely stretched into the claim that people have no access to their own minds, which the paper itself denies, and the work on introspection, metacognition and confabulation that followed it over nearly fifty years has not been surveyed here. Cite it for the mechanism and its stated boundary, not as the current consensus.
Nisbett and Timothy Wilson reviewed the evidence on whether people can report on their own mental processes, in Psychological Review. It is a review of a literature rather than an experiment, so it has no sample of its own. The finding has three parts. People are sometimes unaware of a stimulus that importantly influenced their response, sometimes unaware of the response itself, and sometimes unaware that the stimulus affected the response at all. The explanation is the part that gets dropped. When people account for the process connecting a stimulus to their behaviour, they are not reading off an internal record, they are drawing on implicit causal theories about whether a given thing is a plausible cause of a given response. The paper also states the condition under which reports are accurate, which is that the influential stimulus is salient and is a plausible cause, and that condition is what most summaries lose. On standing, this is one of the most cited papers in psychology and it has been substantially qualified since. It is routinely stretched into the claim that people have no access to their own minds, which the paper itself denies, and the work on introspection, metacognition and confabulation that followed it over nearly fifty years has not been surveyed here. Cite it for the mechanism and its stated boundary, not as the current consensus.
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Reviews evidence suggesting little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes; subjects are sometimes unaware of an influential stimulus, of the response, or that the stimulus affected the response; reports are based on a priori implicit causal theories about whether a stimulus is a plausible cause of a response; accurate reports will occur where influential stimuli are salient and plausible causes, and will not where they are not. Verified at the published record 2026-10-05. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.84.3.231
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- You Do Not Know Why You Bought It, Why We Act
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Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). 'Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes.' Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259. Reviews evidence suggesting little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes; subjects are sometimes unaware of an influential stimulus, of the response, or that the stimulus affected the response; reports are based on a priori implicit causal theories about whether a stimulus is a plausible cause of a response; accurate reports will occur where influential stimuli are salient and plausible causes, and will not where they are not. Verified at the published record 2026-10-05. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.84.3.231