Jonathan Schooler

Introduction

Jonathan Schooler (born August 3, 1959) is an American cognitive psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the META (Memory, Emotion, Thought, Awareness) Lab and the Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential. His research spans consciousness, memory, mind-wandering, creativity, insight and decision-making, and it is united by an interest in how people monitor their own mental states and in how those monitoring processes fail. He is best known for discovering verbal overshadowing, the counterintuitive finding that putting a nonverbal experience into words can damage the memory of it, and for pioneering the study of meta-awareness, the capacity to notice what one's own mind is doing. In the last fifteen years he has become equally prominent as a meta-scientist. Because his own signature effect proved hard to reproduce, Schooler volunteered it for the first large-scale pre-registered replication project in psychology, wrote candidly about what the process revealed, and has since worked on the decline effect, publication bias and the reform of research practice.

Early Life and Education

Schooler studied psychology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, graduating cum laude with a B.A. in 1981. He then moved to the University of Washington, where he completed a master's degree in 1984 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 1987. His graduate training was in the experimental psychology of memory and attention, and it produced early work on the qualities of imagined and perceived experience, including a 1986 paper co-authored with Elizabeth Loftus. That early focus on the boundary between what people experience and what people can report about their experience became the organizing theme of his career, and it is why his later work sits as comfortably in philosophy of mind as it does in cognitive psychology.

Academic and Professional Career

Schooler was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, the same year he completed his doctorate, and he became a research scientist at Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center. He was promoted to associate professor in 1993 and to full professor in 2001. In 2004 he moved to the University of British Columbia as professor of psychology, holding a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Social Cognitive Science and serving as a senior investigator at UBC's Brain Research Centre. He joined the faculty at UCSB in 2007.

His research program has broadened rather than narrowed over time. Early work on memory and imagery gave way, in the 1990s, to studies of insight, verbal overshadowing and the disruptive effects of introspection on judgment. In the 2000s he turned to mind-wandering and meta-awareness, developing with collaborators the notion of perceptual decoupling to describe how attention shifts away from the external world during internally generated thought. More recently his lab has worked on mindfulness training, on how beliefs about free will alter behavior, and on the methodology of science itself. He has published more than two hundred papers, edited Scientific Approaches to Consciousness with Jonathan Cohen in 1997, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental and Social Psychology.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Verbal overshadowing

In 1990 Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler published a result that has become a staple of textbooks on memory. Participants watched a simulated bank robbery and were then asked either to write a detailed description of the perpetrator's face or to perform an unrelated filler task. Those who described the face were substantially worse at picking the perpetrator out of a subsequent lineup. The finding was disturbing for practical reasons: police forces routinely ask witnesses to describe suspects before asking them to make an identification, and the experiment suggested that this sequence actively degrades the evidence. The effect was extended to other domains, notably insight problem-solving, where verbalizing one's reasoning was shown to reduce the chance of solving problems that require a nonverbal restructuring.

Introspection and judgment

Working with Timothy Wilson, Schooler showed in 1991 that the disruptive effect of verbalization generalizes to preferences. Participants asked to analyze why they liked a particular jam ended up agreeing far less with expert taste panels than participants who simply rated the jams; their stated reasons predicted their ratings almost perfectly, but their ratings had moved away from the experts' judgments. The interpretation was that articulation shifts weight toward attributes that are easy to put into words and away from attributes that are hard to verbalize. Schooler has been careful to note the limits of this work: it does not show that deliberation is generally bad, only that introspection can corrupt judgment when the relevant considerations are not easily articulated.

Meta-awareness and the wandering mind

Schooler's second major contribution is the concept of meta-awareness, the intermittent noticing of the contents of consciousness. Working with Jonathan Smallwood, Kalina Christoff and others, he argued that mind-wandering is best understood as thought that is decoupled from perception, and that people vary in how promptly they notice that their minds have drifted. That distinction matters both theoretically and practically: the same amount of mind-wandering has different consequences depending on whether it is noticed, and failures of meta-awareness help explain why people can read a page without taking anything in. The 2011 review "Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind" in Trends in Cognitive Sciences became one of the standard references for the modern study of mind-wandering.

The decline effect and metascience

The most consequential turn in Schooler's career came from watching his own finding shrink. Verbal overshadowing was easy to obtain in his early studies and became progressively harder to reproduce, both in his lab and in others; a 2001 meta-analysis of the eyewitness literature found the effect small and variable, and a 2012 analysis questioned the adequacy of the published record. Drawing on an older term from parapsychology, Schooler argued in a 2011 Nature commentary that the decline effect is a general feature of science: effect sizes routinely shrink with repeated replication, partly because null and failed results go unpublished. His remedy was structural rather than rhetorical — preregistration, protocol logging, and the routine publication of results regardless of outcome.

Anomalous cognition

Alongside the methodological work, Schooler has maintained a long-running interest in anomalous cognition, the claim that human mental capacities such as precognition may exceed current physical theory. He has conducted his own presentiment and precognition experiments and has convened professional symposia on the topic. His position, set out with Stephen Baumgart and Michael Franklin in 2018, is that scientists should adopt a liberal criterion for entertaining such hypotheses and a very strict criterion for endorsing them. He has been explicit that his own results have been equivocal and that several suggestive findings did not survive replication.

Major Publications

Scientific Approaches to Consciousness (1997), edited with Jonathan Cohen, Lawrence Erlbaum — an early interdisciplinary survey of consciousness research.
"Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: Some things are better left unsaid" (1990), with Tonya Engstler-Schooler, Cognitive Psychology — the original demonstration of the effect.
"Thinking too much: Introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions" (1991), with Timothy Wilson, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — the jam study and its generalization to judgment.
"Thoughts beyond words: When language overshadows insight" (1993), with Stellan Ohlsson and Kevin Brooks, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General — extension of verbal overshadowing to problem-solving.
"The value of believing in free will" (2008), with Kathleen Vohs, Psychological Science — showing that undermining belief in free will increases cheating.
"Unpublished results hide the decline effect" (2011), Nature — the essay that made the decline effect a mainstream methodological concern.
"Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind" (2011), with Jonathan Smallwood, Kalina Christoff, Todd Handy, Erik Reichle and Michael Sayette, Trends in Cognitive Sciences — the canonical statement of the meta-awareness framework.
"Turning the lens of science on itself: Verbal overshadowing, replication, and metascience" (2014), Perspectives on Psychological Science — his commentary on the replication of his own effect.
"Entertaining without endorsing: The case for the scientific investigation of anomalous cognition" (2018), with Stephen Baumgart and Michael Franklin, Psychology of Consciousness — his argument for studying contested phenomena without accepting them.

Impact and Legacy

Schooler's influence runs along two tracks. The first is substantive: verbal overshadowing changed how researchers think about the relation between language and memory, and it fed directly into reforms of eyewitness identification procedure, where the order of description and lineup is now treated as a variable that matters. Meta-awareness and perceptual decoupling gave the mind-wandering literature its standard vocabulary, and his work on meta-awareness opened the way for applied research on mindfulness, attention training and classroom attention.

The second track is methodological, and it is where his example has mattered most. When the Association for Psychological Science launched its Registered Replication Report initiative in 2013, the first target chosen was Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990), and Schooler cooperated fully: he supplied the original stimulus materials, vetted the protocol, and publicly welcomed the project whatever the outcome. The result, published in 2014 and based on dozens of laboratories, was decidedly mixed for him. When participants described the perpetrator immediately after the video and were tested twenty minutes later, the pooled effect was a drop of about four percentage points in identification accuracy — real, in the predicted direction, but an order of magnitude smaller than the original twenty-plus-point difference. When the description was given immediately before the lineup, as in the original study, the drop was about sixteen percentage points. The effect survived; its size had been badly overestimated, and its size depended on timing that the original report had not identified as critical.

Schooler's own account of the episode is unusually candid. He noted that he had failed to catch a deviation in the timing intervals of the protocol he himself vetted, that the deviation turned out to be the most scientifically valuable thing about the project, and that the original report had under-specified the very variable that determines the effect's magnitude. He wrote that the project provided an unprecedented demonstration of the value of carefully conducted multisite replication, and he has cited it since as evidence that scientists should treat their own findings as provisional.

Two controversies continue to attach to his work. The first is the replication question itself: some methodologists argue that the verbal overshadowing literature is best explained by publication bias and flexible analysis rather than by a genuine but fragile effect, and that the "decline effect" is simply regression to the mean plus selective reporting rather than a distinct phenomenon requiring new theory. Schooler largely accepts these mechanisms as part of the explanation, though he maintains that they do not exhaust the pattern and that the remedies he proposes — preregistration, protocol registration, publishing null results — are appropriate on either diagnosis. The second is his long involvement with parapsychology. Critics argue that lending the prestige of a mainstream lab to precognition research legitimizes claims that have failed more than a century of testing, and that the field's persistent null results make further work a poor use of resources. Schooler's reply is the "entertaining without endorsing" formula: the standards for deciding a question deserves study are lower than the standards for accepting an answer, and either outcome — a real anomaly or a well-documented history of scientific error — would be informative. He also points out that he has reported his own failures to replicate. The disagreement has not been resolved, but it has been conducted in a way that both sides describe as unusually civil, which is itself part of what Schooler has contributed to the field.