Models with reasoning > Instant have an inner monologue and when asked why they did something they can deduce based on that monologue. I have asked things like "what steps did you take" and "what was your reasoning" and the answer matched the thinking output of the model.

> People have an inner monologue

Perhaps up to 50% of people actually don't have an inner monologue, much like many have aphantasia where they can't actually see anything in their mind either.

If you have examples of studies that verify that people are always aware of the gaps in their memories of why they did things rather than their memories sometimes "filling in the blanks", so to speak, I'd be interested. My impression is that the opposite has a lot more evidence in studies (e.g. around the reliability of eyewitness testimony).

It's not clear to me whether you're aware of a rigorous basis for your claim or you're just inferring based on what you think makes sense, but I can't help but wonder if it's the later, in which case regardless of the mechanism, the outcome certainly seems to resemble what happens with LLMs.

>No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that.

Yes, but the vast, vast majority of decisions you make either don't take place via an inner monologue, or include details that were not actively/consciously "thought" and reasoned with in your inner monologue.

And yet, when asked why you did something, you're not likely to respond "sorry, that decision was made subconsciously". Instead, you use your inner monologue to try to backfill in a reason why. That reason may be correct, or it may not be. You don't actually know, since you have new data that may be updating your own internal state as you try to rationalize it after the fact.

I think this is true with some people, but I don't think this holds true for some (or even most) people across the US (at least not all the folks I've worked with)

Actually split brain experiments tells a different story. The left hemisphere actively confabulates, inventing plausible explanations for actions it didn’t initiate, suggesting that much of human self-narrative may be post-hoc storytelling.