PsychologicalNEUTRAL — Rhetoric

Confabulation

What it is

People have little direct access to the causes of their own judgments and behaviour, and fill the gap with plausible, sincere and often wrong explanations — so the reasons a persuaded person gives are poor evidence of what persuaded them.

How it works

Nisbett and Wilson argued in 1977 that people have little direct access to the causes of their own judgments and behaviour, and that verbal reports are instead constructed from lay theories about what should have caused them. In their department-store study, shoppers asked to pick the best of four identical pairs of stockings chose the rightmost pair four times as often as the leftmost and explained the choice by knit, sheerness and quality; asked whether position had mattered, almost all denied it, some with irritation. Gazzaniga's split-brain patients supplied the neurological version: the left hemisphere, asked why the body had acted on an instruction only the right hemisphere saw, produced a confident, plausible and wrong explanation. Hirstein's 2005 synthesis treats clinical confabulation — patients with memory or awareness deficits who fill gaps with fluent falsehoods they believe — as the extreme of a normal process. The everyday consequence for persuasion is that influence which operates through position, order, mood, priming or framing leaves no trace in the account the person gives, which will instead cite the product's merits, the candidate's policies or the argument's logic. The reasons a persuaded person offers are therefore poor evidence of what persuaded them, including to themselves.

Real-world examples

  • •Nisbett and Wilson's stockings: identical pairs, a strong position effect, and confident explanations in terms of quality from shoppers who denied that position could have mattered.
  • •Gazzaniga's split-brain patient who, when his right hemisphere was shown the command to walk, stood up and, asked why, said he was going to get a drink.
  • •Focus groups and customer interviews reliably produce reasons — features, price, values — for choices that controlled tests show were driven by button colour, page position or default settings.
  • •Achen and Bartels document voters explaining their votes in policy terms while the measurable drivers were partisanship, recent economic conditions and even local droughts and shark attacks.
  • •People who acted on a hunch or a mood produce structured reasons afterwards and sincerely believe them, which is why contemporaneous notes matter more than later testimony in investigations and litigation.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Do not use the fluency of someone's justification as evidence that they consented to, or understood, what moved them; ask what the decision environment did.
  • ●When you influence a choice through cues the person will not report — placement, defaults, framing — disclose the cue rather than letting them own a decision you made.
  • ●In research and marketing, treat stated reasons as data about lay theories, not as measurements of causes; test causes with experiments.

How to defend against it

  • ►For any decision that matters, ask what in the situation could have moved you — order, position, mood, who was in the room — before you accept your own story about why.
  • ►Prefer behavioural evidence to introspection: what did you actually do the last three times, not why you think you would.
  • ►Write down your reasons before you act, then compare them with the reasons you give afterwards; divergence is the confabulation made visible.
  • ►When a persuader asks you to explain why you like something, notice that the act of explaining commits you; decline to generate reasons for a preference you have not yet examined.

References

  1. Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259 · link
    The founding argument and the stockings position-effect study.
  2. Hirstein, W. (2005). Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. MIT Press
    Clinical confabulation as the extreme of a normal explanatory process.
  3. Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000). Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: Does the corpus callosum enable the human condition?. Brain, 123(7), 1293-1326
    The left-hemisphere interpreter in split-brain patients.
  4. Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Harvard University Press
    The limits of introspective access and the construction of self-explanations.
  5. Achen, C. H., & Bartels, L. M. (2016). Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton University Press
    Voters' stated policy reasons versus the measured drivers of their votes.
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