 Empirical work in psychology constitutes another source of doubt about the epistemic status of self-ascriptions. In a widely cited paper, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) present studies showing that subjects routinely misidentify the factors that influenced their reasoning processes. For instance, subjects in one study explained their preference for a product by its apparent quality, when in fact the products were all precisely alike: the subjects’ preferences were apparently driven by the product’s spatial position relative to its competitors seemed to drive the preferences.