>These reactions are psychosomatic It's overly simplistic to treat the unreliability of witnesses as if it can only happen at one level of cognition, as implie

>These reactions are psychosomatic It's overly simplistic to treat the unreliability of witnesses as if it can only happen at one level of cognition, as implied by "psychosomatic". What people perceive and think when they are being lied to is both complex and fundamental to a lot of experiments. If someone reports their feelings, maybe they are interpreting what they do feel based on the false information they are given. It doesn't necessarily mean they do feel the same as if the actual phenomenon occurred. Suppose I was in an experiment testing acupuncture. And I am told that it should not hurt. And yet, it does hurt. That doesn't mean I necessarily report it as such. I might rationalize, not having experience with being stuck with a needle, that this is not painful - it's unpleasant, but it's something different. So I say "no, it doesn't hurt". But then, a month later, I experience a similar pain in a different context, and I say to myself "aha, this hurts the same way, and therefore that previous experience hurt". Importantly, in this scenario, I am correctly perceiving reality at all times even though I am an unreliable reporter. The pain didn't change. I just got confused about whether it was "named" pain and whether it was "socially" pain, and whether it fit into a standard "taxonomy" of pain. A thing that's been on HN a few times, Richard Feynman's comments on understanding rats used in experiments, comes to my mind and makes me think that scientifically minded people should respect humans for being at least as complex as lab rats. One doesn't have to be a scientist to be self-aware as a human being.