1 Psychology and human development1.2 Awareness, sleep and consciousness
1.2.6 Introspection and unconscious attribution
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
New in the 2027 syllabus
The College added this topic for exams from January 2027.
Explaining our own behaviour
Introspection means looking inward at your own thoughts and feelings. It tells you what you experienced. It may not show you the mental processes that produced a judgement or a choice.
Nisbett and Wilson argued that people do not always observe the real causes of their behaviour. Instead, they sometimes infer a plausible cause from general beliefs about why people act as they do.
So a post-hoc explanation (one given after the event) can be sincere and confident and still fail to identify what actually influenced a decision.
Agency and identity
Misattribution means linking an experience to the wrong cause. For example, a person may read bodily arousal from one situation as an emotion caused by another.
Source-monitoring errors happen when someone confuses whether information was perceived, imagined or remembered. This can change where a thought seems to have come from.
Self-knowledge draws on remembered experience, feedback and watching your own behaviour. A stable description of yourself is not an infallible record.
In clinical practice, separate ordinary uncertainty about why someone behaved as they did from fixed delusional misidentification. Delusional misidentification needs a wider assessment.