Why Are People So Confident About Their Stream of Experience?

One theme in my work is this: I don't think people are generally accurate in their reports about their stream of experience, even their concurrently ongoing conscious experience. But if people are so wrong about their phenomenology -- their imagery, their dreams, their inner speech, their visual experience, their cognitive experience -- why are they nonetheless so confident?

My suspicion is this. When we're asked questions about our "inner lives" ("a penny for your thoughts") or when we report on our dreams, our imagery, etc., we almost never get corrective feedback. On the contrary, we get an interested audience who assumes that what we're saying is true. No one ever scolds us for getting it wrong about our experience. This makes us cavalier and encourages a hypertrophy of confidence. Who doesn't enjoy being the sole expert in the room whose word has unchallengeable weight? In such situations, we take up the mantle of authority, exude a blustery confidence -- and feel that confidence sincerely, until we imagine possibly being shown wrong by another authority or by the unfolding of future events. (Professors may be especially liable to this.) About our own stream of experience, however, there appears to be no such humbling danger.

Suppose you're an ordinary undergraduate, and your job is to tutor a low-performing high school student. You are given some difficult poetry to interpret, and the student nods his head and passively receives your interpretation, whatever it happens to be. Then you do it again, the next week, with a different poem. Then again, then again. Pretty soon -- though you'll have received no significant feedback and probably not have improved much in your skills at poetry interpretation -- I'll wager you'll start to feel pretty good about your skills as an interpreter of poetry. You've said some things; they seemed plausible to you; the audience was receptive; no one slapped you down; you run no risk of being slapped down in the future. Your confidence will grow. (So I conjecture. I don't know of any psychological experiments directly on this sort of thing. Although the eyewitness testimony literature shows people's confidence will increase as they repeat the same testimony over and over, that's not quite the same phenomenon.)

Here's another case: Those of us who referee journal articles don't really receive any serious feedback about the quality of our referee reports -- just appreciative remarks from the editors and occasionally (not often, in my experience) very polite letters from the authors explaining how a new revision addresses all our "very useful" criticisms. Yet I'd wager that our confidence in the quality of our referee reports goes up over time; and I'd also wager than the quality of the reports themselves does not go up. Rather, whatever gains we might have in our actual refereeing skills are counterbalanced, or more than counterbalanced, by an increasingly rushed and cavalier attitude toward refereeing as our experience and status increases.

That feeling of being taken seriously, and of saying things that seem plausible to you, without any actual feedback about the quality of your performance -- that is, I think, essentially the situation people are in when reporting on their stream of conscious experience (at least until they meet me!). If I'm right that those are excellent conditions for confidence inflation, that might partly explain our feeling of infallibility.

(I had a nice chat about this yesterday with UCR psychologist Steven Clark.)