Belief reporting is a simple introspective tool for detecting your underlying beliefs on many topics. 

 

One way to think about belief reporting, and the way most practitioners and experimenters think about it, is that it involves holding an intention to do something like “tell the truth,” and then making statements to see if they are consistent with that intention. This has two interesting effects. First, it makes mental content explicit. Second, it allows you to identify a particular class of mental content, a class which we believe is psychologically significant and bears an important relation to actions and emotions.

 

The goal of this guide is to provide a practical set of instructions on how to belief report without assuming any background knowledge or experience with introspection. We then conclude with a brief discussion of why we think belief reporting is an interesting and valuable tool for introspection research.