 In the last episode, we talked about how seeing, hearing, and remembering are all influenced by some of our experiences, and we provided a bunch of examples of each. We talked about two main topics, really. One is called the fundamental cognitive error, and that is the fact that we don't really have any insight into the fact that we're making any sort of interpretation. And the second is this idea of naive realism. That is that the world is exactly as it seems. It's sort of this naive view of the fact that human perception works kind of like a videotape. And human memory works like a videotape as well, that what you see is kind of recorded and then you can retrieve it from memory with kind of perfect accuracy. So we're going to see this week that people don't have any real sort of privileged access to their own memory, their own perception, and the determinants of our own behavior. Yep, there are some classic examples of this. And one of my favorites is by Richard Nisbet and Tim Wilson. Now they set up a table at a market on a busy Saturday morning with four pairs of stockings that they labeled A, B, C, and D, and a sign that said Consumer Evaluation Survey, which is the best quality. Now they encourage people to feel the stockings, and then they ask them to choose which pair they thought was the best quality. Now what people didn't realize was that the four pairs of stockings were identical. So they shouldn't have been any more likely to pick one over the other. So that means if they had four pairs of stockings, then they should be 25. If they were selecting at random, then they should select A 25% of the time, B 25% of the time, and so on for each of the four pairs. That's what you might think. But what actually happened was people picked pair A 12% of the time. Pair B 17% of the time, pair C 31% of the time, and pair D 40% of the time. So they had a massive bias. So they were far more likely to pick pairs of stockings that were on the right side compared to the left side. Now Nisbet and Wilson did a follow-up experiment where again they asked people to choose from these four pairs of identical stockings. And again, people were more likely to choose those who were on the right compared to the left. But now they asked people, why did you choose D? Why did you choose the one on the right? And people said, oh, well, I really liked the color of that one, the knit, the sheen, the elasticity. And they said, well, do you think the order of those could have influenced your judgment in any way? Do you think it was just because this one was on the right compared to the left? And people's reactions to this were classic, and I'll let Nisbet tell the story. So you ask people to do this, and then you say, well, why did you like this one the best? And they give you, well, the color is better, the feel, they're all identical, by the way, except that they look slightly different. And you say, okay, well, that's very interesting, thank you very much. Just one question, do you think that the order in which you looked at those things had an effect on you? And people, they're a little frightened. I mean, either I didn't understand the question or I'm dealing with a madman. Now I think this makes clear that people had very little insight into the basis of their judgments. Why they picked this particular stocking over another. I mean, they actually reported that they were making judgments on the basis of quality rather than anything else. That's right. And Richard Nisbet is a huge proponent of this idea of kind of the power of unconscious processing, that we have no real insight into the determinants of our own behavior. Yep, let's see what he had to say.