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Explaining the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

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Abstract

People tend to think that they know others better than others know them (Pronin et al. in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81: 639–656, 2001). This phenomenon is known as the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” While the illusion has been well documented by a series of recent experiments, less has been done to explain it. In this paper, we argue that extant explanations are inadequate because they either get the explanatory direction wrong or fail to accommodate the experimental results in a sufficiently nuanced way. Instead, we propose a new explanation that does not face these problems. The explanation is based on two other well-documented psychological phenomena: the tendency to accommodate ambiguous evidence in a biased way, and the tendency to overestimate how much better we know ourselves than we know others.

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Notes

  1. See Schlenker and Miller (1977), Greenwald (1980), Riess et al. (1981), Greenberg et al. (1982), and Mezulis et al. (2004) for studies and reviews of the self-enhancement bias.

  2. See Ichheiser (1949), Ross and Ward (1996), and Gilovich and Ross (2015) for studies and reviews of naïve realism.

  3. See also Goffman (1959), Markus (1983), and Andersen and Ross (1984) for studies and discussions of people’s convictions about their own and other people’s knowability.

  4. On another possible reading of Pronin et al.’s discussion of the introspection illusions, they do no seek to explain the illusion of asymmetric insight in terms of the introspection illusion, but rather seek to explain both of these illusions in terms of the knowability illusion. However, even if this is the correct interpretation, our new explanation still provides a unified account of all three illusions, by providing an independent explanation of the illusion of asymmetric insight, which in turn explains the other two.

  5. For useful overviews, see Gilovich (1991, ch. 3) and Oswald and Grosjean (2004).

  6. See Vazire (2010) for further discussion of motivational limitations to self-knowledge.

  7. See, e.g., Nisbett and Wilson (1977) for a classic study.

  8. See e.g. Lun et al. (2008) and Oishi et al. (2013) for recent studies and literature reviews on people’s perception of being misunderstood by others, and the importance of this for their well-being and feeling of being socially connected.

  9. These effects are illustrated in Figure 1 (Pronin et al. 2001: 644).

  10. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this effect to our attention.

  11. We thank an anonymous reviewer for urging us to consider this.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Intellectual History, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Mattias Skipper

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  1. Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen
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  2. Mattias Skipper
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Correspondence to Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen.

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Steglich-Petersen, A., Skipper, M. Explaining the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 769–786 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00435-y

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