There are still philosophers and others who think that the psychological beliefs of most ordinary people are reasonably accurate. Armchair philosophers, including analytic ones and phenomenologists, presume that they can learn about the human mind by introspection, consulting their own intuitions about thought experiments, or paying attention to everyday use of language. The psychological evidence, however, suggests that people are often wrong in their understanding of mind.
For example, many American college students have a fundamental misunderstanding of how vision works. Gerald Winer and his colleagues at the Ohio State University found that approximately half the students maintain the ancient view that vision works as a result of emissions from eyes that go out to objects and then convey information about the objects back to the eyes. This view is completely at odds with the accepted scientific theory that vision works when light from the sun and other sources is reflected off objects into the eyes, stimulating the retina to send signals to the brain.
This error and many other misconceptions about psychology are reported in the valuable book, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, by Scott Lillenfeld and his colleagues. Their list, which is actually much larger than 50, includes such widely held beliefs as the following. Most people use only 10% of their brain power. People are left-brained or right-brained. People have extrasensory perception. Subliminal messages can persuade people to purchase products. Most people experience a midlife crisis in their 40s or early 50s. Human memory works like a camera. Dreams possess symbolic meaning. Ulcers are caused by stress. Opposites attract. Crimes increase during full moons. Most mentally ill people are violent. Almost all people who confess to a crime are guilty of it. People are wrong about these and many other important facts about how the human mind works.
The discrepancy between popular and scientific psychology is consistent with the large body of research that shows that people have numerous misunderstandings of fundamental principles in physics, chemistry, and biology. Nevertheless, it remains a widespread assumption in some approaches to philosophy that understanding of the human mind can be gained through intuition and introspection. Some experimental philosophers also assume that getting a better idea of what people think about their own minds can tell us about how minds really operate. Experimental philosophy has the huge advantage over armchair analytic philosophy that it is does not simply consult the prejudiced intuitions of a single person, namely the philosopher who is claiming to be revealing the nature of “our” conceptual scheme. But consulting the mental reports or intuitions of a large number of people at best provides data to be explained by deeper theories of how the mind works.
Hence philosophers need to abandon the attempt to learn about the mind from consulting the opinions of ordinary people. Scientific psychology has many more sophisticated experimental techniques within its repertoire, ranging from the reaction times and implicit measures of cognitive psychology to the increasingly popular brain scanning tools of cognitive neuroscience. Progress in philosophy of mind requires recognizing that people are largely ignorant and incoherent about the operations of their own minds, and that philosophy needs to follow psychology and neuroscience in order to move on to better mental theories. Trying to understand the mind by introspection, thought experiments, and surveys is like trying to understand the solar system by staring at the sky.