Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes

Ask someone why they did it and you get an answer. The answer is a plausible theory, not a reading of the process.

Nisbett, R. E. & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231

Checked

Against the abstract, 16 September 2026

Why it is on the list

The review gathers evidence for little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. People can be unaware of the thing that influenced them, unaware of their response, or unaware that the one produced the other. The paper proposes that these reports draw on a priori, implicit causal theories — judgements about whether a given thing is a plausible cause of a given response.

For week 2’s interviews, a fluent explanation of a convention can be a plausible theory of it. The interviewee does not have to be evasive for the account to be mistaken.

The authors also describe when reports can be accurate: when the influential thing is salient and is a plausible cause of the response. Week 2 uses that limit to propose questions about a specific exchange. “You just said ‘good, you?’ — what would have happened if you’d said ‘terrible’?” still asks for a prediction, not an observation. Keep that answer as a hypothesis and test it against a real exchange; pointing at a recent event does not turn a counterfactual into something that happened.