ABSTRACT
The assumption that introspection somehow vanished has issued in periodic calls to revisit some form of self-observation. The persistence of something like a “debate” over the status of self-observation is written deeply into the soul of psychology—in every generation, self-observation seems always to find its legions of detractors and yet always remains, in one form or another, at the heart of psychological research. Most theories of self-observation treat it as an ontologically and epistemologically special case—that is, they assume that the observation of “objects” is a fundamentally different kind of activity than is the observation of “consciousness”. The final general way in which the self-observer is considered error-prone is in terms of personal interpretive bias—that is, because a self-observation report will always be an interpretation of one’s experience it will always be subject to various forms of cognitive distortion. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
