Introspection
Think, for a moment, about an acquaintance you have recently met. Why do you feel the way you do about this person? A considerable amount of research indicates that answering this question can change your attitude toward your acquaintance. Thinking about reasons has been found to change people’s attitudes toward a variety of attitude objects, including other people, food items, puzzles, and works of art. Wilson and Kraft (1993), for example, asked college students involved in steady dating relationships to think about why they felt the way they did about their relationships. Compared to a control group who did not analyze reasons, these students were significantly more likely to change their minds about how they felt about the relationship.
When thinking about reasons, people focus on attributes of the attitude object that are accessible in memory, plausible as causes of their feelings, and easy to verbalize. Because people do not have perfect access to the reasons for their attitudes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Wilson & Stone, 1985) the reasons that are plausible, accessible, and easy to verbalize are often unrepresentative of the actual causes of their attitudes, and thus can imply a somewhat different attitude than they held before they thought about reasons.
People’s reasons often are constrained by the limits of human introspection, and yet people do not seem to recognize this fact. That is, people are often unaware of their own unawareness (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
Seligman et al. (1980) asked dating couples one of two types of questions about why they were attracted to their dating partner. Half of the couples were asked questions designed to elicit intrinsic reasons; for example, they were to complete the sentence, “I date my girlfriend/boyfriend because I . . . ” The others were asked designed to elicit extrinsic reasons; for example, they were to complete the sentence, “I date my girlfriend/boyfriend in order to . . . ” People did not seem to recognize that their reasons were biased by the wording of the questions, as indicated by the fact that they assumed that their reasons matched their current attitudes: Those in the intrinsic condition reported significantly more love for their dating partner, and reported that it was significantly more likely that they would marry their partner.
“Effects of Introspecting about Reasons: Inferring Attitudes from Accessible Thoughts,” by Timothy D. Wilson, Sara D. Hodges, and Suzanne J. LaFleur