I’ve been thinking a lot about confabulation lately, because large language models do it too. And in particular, last night I read an interesting study (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388) that shows that LLMs, asked to explain their decisions, come up with a plausible story that doesn’t necessarily reflect their actual decision process. This is very much something humans do; for examples, see the post quoted below, particularly the section on choice blindness.
We have so far explored confabulation in patients with brain damage. Do neurotypical, everyday people produce “honest lies”?
We confabulate all the time.. We just don’t realize that we are.
In Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes, Nisbett & Wilson (1977) review hundreds of studies, across dozens of disciplines. Their evidence admits a theme: people’s attempts to explain their behavior is almost always unhelpful in identifying the important factors influencing their decisions. Let me briefly review four example findings.