Descriptive Experience Sampling

"Inner space is the real frontier."
-- Gloria Steinem

Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) is a method of exploring the phenomena and characteristics of a person's inner experience. DES uses a random beeper to signal the subject to pay attention to the "inner experience" that was ongoing at the moment of the beep. Typically, the DES subject wears the random beeper in his/her natural environment, while going about his/her daily routine, and collects between six and eight "samples" across a three-hour period. Subsequently, within 24-hours, the subject and investigator meet to discuss the details of such beeped moments of experience. The investigator then prepares a written description of the subject's inner experience. DES is fundamentally idiographic--designed to discover the characteristics of particular individuals, one individual at a time. However, some characteristics have been found frequently in many individuals: inner speech, inner seeing (aka images), unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness. The DES codebook provides a description of these and other phenomena discovered by DES. More...






















We are interested in people's experience...

Jeffrey Dahmer captures, murders, and hacks up 12 victims, storing their body parts in his deep freeze. You wonder, "What goes through his mind?"

Mark McGwire smacks the ball, watches for a moment as the ball that will be his 62nd home run sails toward left field bleachers, salutes the Maris family as he rounds first base and heads for home. You wonder, "What's he feeling?"

Your friend seems strangely distant. You ask her what's wrong and she says, "Nothing." You wonder, "What's going on with her?"

...but really we don't know much about it.

We ask "What goes through his or her experience?" over and over, about both public and personal matters, about both important and mundane concerns, about events that have little or grave consequences for us. Descriptive Experience Sampling shows that despite its ubiquity and importance, we may not know how to give accurate answers to such questions.

"How can that be?" you ask. "I hear answers to those questions all the time on TV, from interviews with the people themselves and from psychological experts."

Yes, you do hear those answers, and they do generally sound plausible. But the fact is that people are very likely to be quite ignorant about their own thoughts and feelings and are therefore incapable of communicating accurately about them. Psychology is no less ignorant about inner experience.

"Wait just a minute!" you say. "I'm not ignorant about my thoughts and feelings. I spend my entire waking life, hundreds of thousands of hours, engaged in them!" While it is undeniably true that some people do have accurate access to their inner experience, it is more likely that you think you have accurate access but are mistaken. You should be skeptical about your awareness of and your knowledge about your own inner experience.

Despite this apparent familiarity, you are in fact very likely to be quite ignorant about your own inner experience.

I mean "ignorant" in its active sense--the result of ignoring. Scientific psychology has been telling us for 75 years to ignore inner experience. Psychology declares that inner experience doesn't exist; or if it exists, it is impossible to observe accurately; or if it is possible to observe accurately, it is not important.

Not knowing people's experience is a problem...

Psychology is wrong on all three counts, but its position has been persuasive. Our culture has indeed learned to ignore serious consideration of inner experience, and we have not faced the consequences of this ignorance.

These consequences are both personal and societal. To the extent that you personally are ignorant about your inner experience you are likely to distort, misinterpret, and misrepresent yourself, your relationships, and the world around you, sometimes with life-or-death ramifications.

Perhaps more importantly, understanding inner experience also has substantial societal consequences. Our society's shallow self-centeredness, its preoccupation with things instead of people, and its rampant violence are in large measure the result of our dulled awareness of inner experience.

Descriptive Experience Sampling may solve some of these problems.

Previous studies of inner experience have all been retrospective - they ask people to look back and recall the characteristics of their inner experience over an indeterminate period of time. Descriptive Experience Sampling shows that such strategies are almost always nonproductive or misleading. About 30 years ago I invented a simple but (I think) elegant method of exploring inner experience that avoids the retrospective trap. I call this method "Descriptive Experience Sampling"; it uses a random beeper to cue people to collect random samples of their inner experience as they move through their own natural environments. This research method asks one question over and over again, thousands of times: "What are the details of your inner experience at this very moment?" The results of these investigations contradict notions about how we think and feel that almost everyone takes for granted.

This method demonstrates that if you use a proper method (such as Descriptive Experience Sampling) it is actually quite easy for most people to observe and give faithful reports about inner experience. It is possible to acquire the self-observation skill, sometimes with dramatic personal effect.

I think the Descriptive Experience Sampling method can paint a more faithful portrait of inner experience than is possible by any other method used in Western Psychology. Descriptive Experience Sampling describes inner experience carefully. It gives a glimpse of inner experience that is clearer and of higher fidelity than has ever been seen in our culture. It shows that how people think and feel differs substantially from one person to the next, that those differences are fascinating, important, and probably surprising, and that significant personality characteristics may be associated with those differences.

It is of course possible to keep our heads in the inner experience sand - we have been doing just that for decades - but that is a vulnerable posture both for us personally and for society. Descriptive Experience Sampling provides an alternative. Psychology has ignored the inner world for 75 years and society at large has followed its lead. The results have been disastrous; we can no longer afford it.

Thus Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) is a method of exploring inner experience developed by Russell T. Hurlburt and his colleagues. DES seeks simply to describe inner experience, not to quantify it, based on the view that careful descriptions should be the foundation stones on which subsequent quantification should rest.

The DES subject carries a small beeper that beeps at random intervals. The subject's task is to 'freeze' her ongoing experience and to write a brief description of it in a notebook. We are not particularly interested in any explanation of the thoughts or other experiences; we simply wish her to describe that particular inner experience as it naturally occurred. After she has collected six or eight samples, the subject meets with us for an extended conversation about those samples. This sample and discussion process is then repeated the next day, and is repeated again until we think we have obtained an adequate number of samples. At the conclusion of the sampling period, we identify the salient characteristics of the complete set of samples.

Prospective subjects for this procedure frequently attempt an informal version of the procedure in anticipation of their participation, asking themselves on occasion, for example, "What am I thinking right now?" Such informal attempts are nearly always discouraging, leading the typical subject to believe, prior to sampling, that he or she will be unable to perform the sampling task. However, we have found that most subjects find the actual sampling task to be quite easy and unambiguous.

The most condensed description of the DES method is provided in Hurlburt and Chris Heavey's 2006 book Exploring Inner Experience

Hurlburt and philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel teamed up to debate the adequacy introspective techniques by exploring the inner experience of "Melanie" in Describing Inner Experience?, published in 2007 by The MIT Press.

Hurlburt's 1990 book Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience provides the most elaborated account of the method, and his 1993 book Sampling Inner Experience in Disturbed Affect describes a variety of applications of the method.

The DES Codebook provides a description of frequently found phenomena.






































Books about Descriptive Experience Sampling

• Describing Inner Experience? Proponent meets Skeptic (with Eric Schwitzgebel; MIT Press, 2007). Hurlburt and philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel teamed up to debate the adequacy introspective techniques by exploring the inner experience of "Melanie."
• Exploring Inner Experience (with Chris Heavey; John Benjamins, 2006). The most condensed description of the DES method.
• Sampling Inner Experience in Disturbed Affect (Plenum Press, 1993). Applies DES to a variety of individuals.
• Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience (Plenum Press, 1990). Provides the most elaborated (and first) account of the DES method.

Cover art by James Krizman.

Sampling Inner Experience in Disturbed Affect by Russell T. Hurlburt This book applies the descriptive experience sampling method to case studies of anxious, depressed, bulimic, and borderline personality individuals. Reference Hurlburt, R. T. (1993). Sampling inner experience in disturbed affect. New York: Plenum Press. See also Hurlburt, R. T., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2007). Describing inner experience? Proponent meets skeptic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hurlburt, R. T., & Heavey, C. L. (2006). Exploring inner experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hurlburt, R. T. (1990). Sampling normal and schizophrenic inner experience. New York: Plenum Press.

Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience by Russell T. Hurlburt This book introduces the descriptive experience sampling method and provides case studies of normal and schizophrenic individuals. View the Table of Contents and excerpts. Reference Hurlburt, R. T. (1990). Sampling normal and schizophrenic inner experience. New York: Plenum Press. See also Hurlburt, R. T., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2007). Describing inner experience? Proponent meets skeptic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hurlburt, R. T., & Heavey, C. L. (2006). Exploring inner experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hurlburt, R. T. (1993). Sampling inner experience in disturbed affect. New York: Plenum Press.

Exploring Inner Experience by Russell T. Hurlburt and Christopher L. Heavey This book discusses how to do the descriptive experience sampling method. View the annotated Table of Contents. Reference Hurlburt, R. T., & Heavey, C. L. (2006). Exploring inner experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also Hurlburt, R. T., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2007). Describing inner experience? Proponent meets skeptic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hurlburt, R. T. (1993). Sampling inner experience in disturbed affect. New York: Plenum Press. Hurlburt, R. T. (1990). Sampling normal and schizophrenic inner experience. New York: Plenum Press.

Describing Inner Experience? Proponent meets Skeptic by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel This book brings together psychologist Russ Hurlburt and University of California, Riverside philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel in a debate about whether or to what extent inner experience can be faithfully described. It uses the descriptive experience sampling method to interview volunteer subject Melanie, and then discusses in detail the validity of those interviews. More Published by The MIT Press, 2007. Visit the book's web site to find transcripts and audio recordings of the interviews. Reviews Salon.com review Journal of Consciousness Studies review Metaspsychology Online Reviews Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews TLS (Times Literary Supplement) review Psychology Today Blogs MyMindOnBooks.com Full text The penultimate draft of this manuscript is available by clicking the desired section below if you wish to view it in accord with "fair use" laws. Do not quote this draft; please quote the published book. Preface, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Reference Hurlburt, R. T., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2007). Describing inner experience? Proponent meets skeptic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. See also Hurlburt, R. T., & Heavey, C. L. (2006). Exploring inner experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hurlburt, R. T. (1993). Sampling inner experience in disturbed affect. New York: Plenum Press. Hurlburt, R. T. (1990). Sampling normal and schizophrenic inner experience. New York: Plenum Press.