WHY WE’RE ALL NATURAL BORN STORYTELLERS
INTROSPECTION & CONFABULATION
It’s nice to think that all of our thoughts, actions and behaviours can be explained through logic and reasoning. I like x because of y. I did a because of b. I thought c because of d. And so on.
In reality, however, this often isn’t the case at all. Our brains are just so good at making up stories for why we did something that we even tend to believe them ourselves.
Key to this idea is the introspection illusion. This is the cognitive bias whereby we tend to believe that we have direct insight into the origins of our mental states — that is, we believe we know why we felt something or thought something.
In reality, our emotions and feelings have their origins deep within us, in the primitive and largely subconscious parts of the brain. There may not always be a logical, rational reason for them — but our conscious brain essentially makes one up, even if the process was not a conscious one. When people are asked why they have a particular preference for something, or how they arrived at a particular idea, they will essentially make up some sort of explanation which can reasonably be believed.
In a brilliant experiment by Petter Johansson and colleagues, participants were shown two photos of two different people, and were asked to pick the one they thought was most attractive. They then were handed a larger photo, and were told it was an enlarged version of the one they had just picked. In reality, it was a photo of a completely different person. When the participants were then asked why they had chosen it, none hesitated in their answer; instead, they all dutifully explained their ‘choice’, listing all the rational reasons why they had ‘chosen’ that photo. For example, they might say, “I chose this picture because I like blondes”, even though they had actually originally chosen a brunette.
This adaptive storytelling, whereby we create plausible explanations for our thoughts and actions post-factum, is known as confabulation. Ratherthan acknowledge its own lack of insight, the brain makes up a plausible story; and is blissfully unaware that it has done so.
Perhaps the most striking examples of confabulation come from experiments on split brain patients — those who have a severed corpus callosum, the part of the brain which links the right and left hemispheres. Incredibly, these experiments show that one half of the brain will automatically make up a story to essentially ‘explain’ what the other half has done. See here for an example, or here for a longer explanation (well worth a read).
In another neat experiment by neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to zap parts of the brain, making participants’ fingers move involuntarily. When this happened, Alvaro found that participants consistently reported that they had made the decision to move themselves.
With these insights in mind, then, we must be mindful when conducting any sort of user testing or behavioural analysis. If we ask people why they did something — why did you choose this, why didn’t you do that, why did you change your mind — they are unlikely to say ‘I don’t know’. Instead, they will tend to provide an explanation, but one which may not be entirely accurate (even if they don’t realise it themselves). To truly understand why people are behaving the way they are, and to design effective solutions to change their actions and decisions, a deeper understanding is needed of the subconscious motivators of behaviour — those that may be missed by the confabulating brain when it’s creating these explanatory stories.
Written by: Jordan Buck, Consultant at Ogilvy Consulting Behavioural Science Practice
Sources:
Gazzaniga, M.S. (1988) The Split Brain Revisited. Scientific American, 50–55.
Johansson, P., Hall, L., Silkstrom, S. & Olsson, A. (2005) Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task. Science, 310(5745), 116–119.
Wilson, T.D. & Bar-Anan, Y. (2008) The Unseen Mind. Science, 321(5892), 1046–1047.
