Being Wrong About Personal Transformation

Abstract Transformative experiences are thought to change us in different ways. Some transform us epistemically by providing genuinely new, previously unimaginable experiences, while others bring about personal transformation by altering our values. Recent debates on transformative experiences have explored the challenges these experiences pose for decision theory and medical ethics, prompting efforts to better understand their nature. An important but largely unexplored epistemic question concerns how we come to know that an experience has had a transformative impact. In this paper, I examine this issue, focusing on the epistemologically more complex case of personal transformation. I argue that while epistemic transformation is transparent—making first‐person judgments about it highly reliable—first‐person judgments regarding personal transformation are more complex, inferential, and prone to error. To explore these complexities, I introduce the phenomenon of Transformative Dazzle—situations in which the inherent error‐proneness of inferences about personal transformation leads to mistaken self‐attributions of personal transformation. I further elaborate on how such errors may be identified, both in everyday life and in empirical research on transformative experiences.