We humans have a tendency to overestimate ourselves
and deceive ourselves. In Social Psychology the effect of overconfidence is there
he anticipates that many times the confidence in our potential is beyond our own
power and reality, and a lot.
to explain our behaviors and our decisions. In psychology
this is known as the "Illusione
of Introspection”, A name given to the process by which we create a
justification for our decisions when we really don't know why
we took. One of the first approximations to this concept
it was made by psychologists from the University of Michigan, Richard Nisbett e
Timothy D. Wilson in 1977, which started with a series of experiments
they speculated that when we cannot access the mental process that we do
leads to a certain decision, we invent an explanation that can
offer any sense to it. In the experiment in question the researchers
they handed a few pairs of socks to a group of women and asked them what
they chose the ones they liked best. Once the choice is made, the
women explained the details that led them to choose, by doing
reference to aspects such as: texture, color, appearance ... but,
the experiment hid a trick: all the stockings that had been theirs
delivered were identical. But the Illusion of Introspection was even clearer
in a more recent experiment developed by researchers Johansson and Hall. In
on this occasion, the researchers showed people two photos of people from the
opposite sex to choose the one that was most attractive to them. In
subsequently, each person had to justify their decision. The part
curious was that the researchers, thanks to a trick of conjuring,
they replaced the image that had been chosen and finally showed them the photo
which was not selected. Surprisingly, 70% of people didn't give up
account of the deception and, evidently, invented various reasons for which
he had chosen that face. And if that's not enough, the researchers asked
people if they could detect a movement with which someone
could have replaced the image. 84% of the deceived people claimed to
Yes. This phenomenon was referred to by scholars as:
"Choice blindness" (we already know that psychologists have a weird
compulsion to call the same things by different names) and, as you can
imagine, has been the subject of further experiments which confirm this. In summary, many times we are victims of our own
same prejudices or wrong beliefs. We think we have the necessary
knowledge of ourselves when instead we are making risky decisions
but we do not wish (or are unable) to recognize it. So, normally there
we allow ourselves to be tempted by the illusion of being better than the average (the
blind spot bias) or we believe our values and forms of
think they are widespread and shared by a huge number of people compared to
how much it is not in reality (effect of false consent). Tricks that the mind plays on us
or… maybe… tricks we do to ourselves to avoid facing the
the fact that we actually have a very limited ability to control our own
atmosphere.
