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LIT-1410: Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1412) in full, from a scan of the published article in an MIT course-readings folder (https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Social_Cognition/Nisbett_Wilson_1977_Telling_more_than_we_can_know.pdf); worth reading as the review, with eight small studies of its own, that people's reports of why they responded as they did miss effective stimuli and credit ineffective ones, and match what observers predict from a description alone, so that they come from causal theories, not from access to the process. Read it knowing that its situations were chosen to produce error, that several of its own studies are reported briefly or unpublished, that it is about the influence of stimuli on responses, not about attributions of agency, and that it shows only that such access as exists does no better than an observer, not that there is none.
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Tagscognition, self
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1412 — Nisbett and Wilson — Telling more than we can know

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Nisbett, R. E. and Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.84.3.231.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1412).

Why this is here

The exchange cited it for CASE-114, “The imagined owner”: a self-report of why one acted can be a construction from a theory of oneself, not a readout of the process. The exchange gave no description to check against the abstract.

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