Related: Cached Selves, The Neuroscience of Desire

You don't know your own mind.
- Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation

Researchers showed subjects two female faces for a few seconds and asked which face was more attractive. Researchers then placed the photos face down and handed subjects the face they had chosen, asking them to explain the motives behind their choice. But sometimes, researchers used a sleight-of-hand trick to switch the photos, showing viewers the face they had not chosen. Very few subjects noticed the face they were given was not the one they had chosen. Moreover, they happily explained why they preferred the face they had actually rejected, inventing reasons like "I like her smile" even though they had actually chosen the solemn-faced picture.¹

The idea that we lack good introspective access to our own desires - that we often have no idea what we want² - is a key lemma in naturalistic metaethics, so it seems worth a post to collect the science by which we know that.

Early warnings came from split-brain research, which identified an 'interpreter' in the left hemisphere that invents reasons for beliefs and actions. When the command 'walk' was flashed to split-brain subjects' right hemispheres, they got up from their chairs and start walking away. When asked why they suddenly started walking away, they replied (for example) that they got up because they wanted a Coke.³

The overjustification effect

Common sense suggests that we infer others' feelings from their appearance and actions, but we have a different, more direct route to our own feelings: direct perception or introspection.⁴ In contrast, self-perception theory⁵ suggests that our knowledge of ourselves is exactly like our knowledge of others.⁶ One famous result explained by self-perception theory is the overjustification effect.

In a famous 1973 study,

nursery school children drew pictures with a magic marker, a presumably intrinsically interesting activity, under one of three reward conditions. In the first condition the children expected to receive a reward (a fancy 'good player' award) for drawing, in the second they received the reward unexpectedly, and children in a third group received no reward. Only the expected reward produced a decrement in performance, during a later 'free p

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