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TheOtherDave comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong
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I'm confident I'm not generalizing from one example, though I might certainly be overestimating the relevance of my sample.
To be a little more concrete, I would be very surprised if it turned out that more than, say, 10% of the population honestly included all of those elements, or even most of them, in their imagined triangle if instructed to imagine a triangle. Do you think I'm overconfident about that?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
I'm not sure you can generally answer that by introspection. At least in my case, when prompted by the question I remember having seen the specific detail. However knowing how the mind works, I also assign high probability to the explanation that my mind filled in the requested detail when prompted - rewriting my memory, loosely speaking. This is, I believe, the same phenomenon that makes eyewitness testimony so unreliable.
I agree completely, but it's socially conventional to ask people questions about our past experiences as though we were a definitive source of information about it.