Could a choice-prediction design test whether retrospective narration captures real tacit judgment or post-hoc reconstruction?

Whether a design that has the expert make a judgment silently, then narrate it retrospectively, and checks whether the narration predicts the next judgment better than chance could directly test the reconstruction hypothesis from reactivity-surfaces-tacit.

The choice-prediction design sidesteps the "is it real or reconstructed?" debate by giving it an objective criterion. The debate between Ericsson and Simon (concurrent verbalisation captures working memory) and Nisbett and Wilson (reports on higher-order processes are confabulated) has stalled partly because there is no clean criterion for whether a verbal report is a genuine read or a plausible-sounding rationalisation. The choice-prediction design proposes one: have the expert make the midpoint judgment silently, then narrate it retrospectively, and check whether the narration predicts the next judgment better than chance. If the narration captured real judgment, it should predict; if it was reconstruction, it should not. The design converts a philosophical question (is introspection direct or inferential?) into a measurable one (does the narration carry signal?). This is the test Nisbett and Wilson's critique implies but never ran in this form (read 2026-06-20 — Wikipedia: Introspection illusion (read 2026-06-20); Wikipedia: Introspection (read 2026-06-20)).

Choice blindness already showed that people confabulate explanations for choices they did not make — the prediction is reconstruction, not real judgment. Johansson, Hall and Sikström (2006) found that when participants' choices were secretly swapped, they still produced detailed explanations for the choice they thought they had made — explanations that were entirely confabulated, since the actual choice was different. This is the strongest evidence that retrospective narration of a choice is reconstruction, not a read of the process that produced the choice. Applied to the choice-prediction design: if the expert narrates a judgment they already made, the narration is likely a rationalisation of the outcome, not a description of the process — and a rationalisation of the past choice should not predict the next one better than chance, because it was invented to explain, not to capture the generating mechanism (read 2026-06-20 — Wikipedia: Introspection illusion — choice blindness (read 2026-06-20); Johansson, Hall, Sikström, Tärning & Lind 2006, cited there).

Ericsson and Simon's framework allows for partial prediction if some explicit access exists — but the tacit judgment is the part the framework says is not there. The framework says concurrent verbalisation captures what is in working memory, and procedural knowledge is not there. A retrospective narration might capture the explicit parts of the judgment (the options weighed, the criteria named) while missing the tacit part (the automatic pattern-matching that decided). If the next judgment shares the same tacit component, the narration's explicit portion might predict weakly — better than chance but far from perfectly. The choice-prediction design could measure this partial signal: if the narration predicts the next judgment at above-chance but below-expert level, the explicit layer carried some signal and the tacit layer did not. This would be the most informative outcome — it would show that retrospective narration captures the skeleton but not the flesh, exactly as think-aloud-annotated-checklist predicted (read 2026-06-20 — Wikipedia: Protocol analysis (read 2026-06-20); Wikipedia: Think aloud protocol (read 2026-06-20)).

The design is buildable and unbuilt. No study has run the choice-prediction design in this form — silent judgment, retrospective narration, prediction of the next judgment. The components exist: retrospective think-aloud protocols are a standard method (Kuusela & Paul 2000), choice blindness provides the confabulation benchmark, and the prediction criterion is straightforward. The design's one subtlety is that the two judgments must share enough structure that prediction is possible but differ enough that the narration cannot simply be parroted — the expert must generalise from the narration to a new case, which tests whether the narration captured the generating principle or only the specific outcome. The prediction from the Nisbett and Wilson side is that the narration will not predict better than chance; the prediction from the Ericsson and Simon side is partial prediction; the design adjudicates (read 2026-06-20 — Wikipedia: Think aloud protocol — concurrent vs retrospective (read 2026-06-20); reactivity-surfaces-tacit room — the prediction is reconstruction (castle, built 2026-06-20)).

The honest state. The choice-prediction design is a clean, buildable test of whether retrospective narration captures real tacit judgment or post-hoc reconstruction. It converts the stalled philosophical debate into a measurable prediction: if the narration predicts the next judgment better than chance, it captured signal; if not, it was reconstruction. Choice blindness already showed that retrospective explanations of choices are confabulated, so the prediction from the reconstruction side is that the narration will not predict. But the Ericsson and Simon framework allows for partial prediction from the explicit layer, and the most informative outcome would be above-chance but below-expert — the skeleton captured, the flesh not. The design has never been run, and its one design subtlety is ensuring the two judgments share structure but differ in specifics, so the narration must generalise rather than parrot.

uncertain: whether the two judgments can be made similar enough for prediction to be meaningful yet different enough to rule out parroting — the design's validity hinges on this calibration, and no existing study has established the right distance.