Introspection Illusion: Why You’re Wrong About Yourself (and so Am I)

To truly “know thyself”, pay less attention to how you feel or think, and focus on this mindset instead.

What are you seeing right now? What objects are in front of you? Try to describe it as accurately as possible. Take a minute before you continue reading.

Now, another question: how are you feeling right now? What emotions can you identify with? Try to describe it as accurately as possible. Take a minute before you continue reading.

“I have no words”

In the first question above, I believe you could answer it very precisely.

You are looking at a screen, at some black letters on a white background. Maybe you tried to look up and let your gaze sweep across the room: you saw a table, furniture, a cup of glass, pictures on the wall. No matter what you saw, you had no trouble explaining it.

Then, how about the answers to the follow-up questions about emotions? I’m guessing they are probably somewhat equivocal.

Maybe you are in a bad mood, but how do you really feel? Are you angry, disappointed, sulky, upset, annoyed? And if you are in a good mood, what precisely do you feel? Are you feeling calm, joyful, pleased, contented?

Or maybe you feel nothing at all, and the ‘emotion’ only came to the surface the moment I asked you about it.

Don’t get frustrated if you have a hard time describing your emotions. It’s not just you, everybody can’t explain their emotions clearly and precisely, including me.

It’s not because we suck at describing it verbally.

English has more than 300 adjectives to identify different “emotions”. There are even 21 kinds of emotions that no English words can describe.

All those existing words, yet, too often our emotions would still leave us with, apparently… no words.

A new study reveals that context can easily shape our emotions. Although you may very well believe you know how you feel — the sensations of anger, contentment, fear, pleasure or any other kinds of emotions are not nearly as distinct as you might’ve assumed.

Your emotion is always changing depending on your mood and whatever context you put in the moment you think about that emotion.

Sometimes, you may even misinterpret those signals with profound consequences.

Emotion is a broken internal compass

By nature, human beings are first and foremost emotional creatures.

It’s hard enough to live with emotions, then we find ourselves in a world where almost everyone constantly pushes us to ‘follow our hearts.’

They tell us nonstop: Trust your emotions! Listen to your inner voice!

Alright… But which ‘inner voice’ am I supposed to listen to? There are over 300 different emotions, remember? (and don’t forget the 21 non-existent words about emotions)

I’m not saying your emotions or your inner feelings are bad. I’m totally aware of the fact that we can’t live without emotions.

But what most people don’t know — or maybe don’t want to accept — is most of our emotions are indeed flawed and unreliable.

In his book, The Art of The Good Life, Rolf Dobelli gave some insights about why emotion is not a good “internal compass” in our lives.

“As an internal compass, your emotion comprises a dozen magnetic needless, all pointing in different directions and swiveling incessantly around and around. Would you sail across the ocean with a compass like that? Exactly. So don’t use it to navigate your life.” — Rolf Dobelli.

If you want to build a better internal compass; you need to stop listening to your inner voice all the time.

At least that’s what I did to make better and less screwed-up decisions. At least that’s what I did to avoid stupidly asking myself, “What was I thinking?” after making a terrible decision — when the likelihood was that I didn’t think of anything at all.

Avoiding Introspection Illusion

Introspection is often a very inaccurate source of self-knowledge.

There, I said it.

Again, due to our feelings and emotions, when introspecting, we are mostly just making things up.

Psychologists call it the introspection illusion; the mistaken belief that we can learn what we truly desire, discover our life’s purpose, find out the meaning of life, and dig down to some golden, blissful core merely through sheer intellectual contemplation called introspection.

Sorry, but no.

Over-dependence on introspection will put us on the line: decreases our performance, reduces the quality of our decisions, and even destroys our self-insight.

So what can we do instead?

Rather than introspection, the better way to gain more accurate self-knowledge is through self-evaluation.

Self-evaluation is a systematic procedure for observing, analyzing, and assessing your actions and results in order to stabilize or improve your performance.

How could you do it? Write.

Write down your goals, your key plans, take notes of your priorities. Basically, write down everything — but don’t stop there.

Ask and get regular feedback from your trusted friends, peers at work, fellow creators, or even strangers (if you want to) to track your progress systematically.

According to research, friends — and even strangers — are often better barometers of our traits than ourselves. Your friends will help give much better judgment about yourself rather than you ever will.

Not every friend is capable of doing that, of course. But you know what kind of “friends” I’m talking about here; the real ones, those who know you inside out — listen to them.

Whether we like it or not, we are not the know-it-alls about ourselves like we think we are.

Timothy D. Wilson, author of Strangers to Ourselves, says that while it’s a rewarding attempt to “know thyself,” you are better off paying more attention to what you do than to how you feel or think — and this is where you need friends to do so.

As Bill Gates once said:

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”

Effective feedback is necessary to improve and make better-informed decisions. Then, whether or not we take their opinions or criticisms; it’s all up to us.

To filter them, remember what Frank. A Clark once said:

“Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots.“

—Frank A. Clark

The Big Takeaway

Introspection Illusion is a cognitive bias where we wrongly think we have direct insights into the origins of our mental states. Sadly, we don’t. You are wrong about yourself. And so am I.

Instead of self-introspection, we can self-evaluate by writing down goals, results and actions, as well as getting effective feedback from others. It all starts with accepting the fact that we don’t know everything about ourselves as we think.

And since our emotions are so unreliable, a good rule of thumb is to take them less seriously. As to how Rolf Dobelli put it:

“Take other people’s feelings seriously, but not your own. Let them flit through you — they’ll come and go anyway, just as they please.”