... Many researches argue that individual introspections about what is determining his or her behavior are often inaccurate. They may be limited in scope, due to lack of conscious awareness of many cognitive processes or their products. But even though sometimes despised as subjective and unscientific, introspection has again found its validity and place in psychology, especially when properly used and interpreted. Rather than told to interpret their experience participants are nowadays asked to describe the contents of focal attention. Their reports are not used as a direct description of cognitive processes, but rather treated as any other behavioral data. In a set of recent experiments motivated partly by these considerations, Daniel Hart and colleagues found that although children tended to appeal to their physical features in standard free-recall tasks about the self, the same children regard their psychological characteristics as most important to their self. Hart and colleagues used philosophically-inspired ...

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