Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It!

Abstract

Choice blindness is the finding that participants both often fail to notice mismatches between their decisions and the outcome of their choice and, in addition, endorse the opposite of their chosen alternative. But do these preference reversals also carry over to future choices and ratings? To investigate this question, we gave participants the task of choosing which of a pair of faces they found most attractive. Unknown to them, we sometimes used a card trick to exchange one face for the other. Both decision theory and common sense strongly suggest that most people would easily notice such a radical change in the outcome of a choice. But that was not the case: no more than a third of the exchanges were detected by the participants. We also included a second round of choices using the same face pairs, and two stages of post‐choice attractiveness ratings of the faces. This way we were able to measure preference strength both as choice consistency and by looking at measures of rating differences between chosen and rejected options. We found that the initially rejected faces were chosen more frequently in the second choice, and the perceived attractiveness of these faces was increased even in uncoupled individual ratings at the end of the experiment. This result is discussed in relation to Chen and Risen's recent criticism of the Free Choice Paradigm, as it shows that choices can affect future preferences. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory

“…Experiment 1 demonstrated that the misinformation effect could be elicited from participants by telling them they had reported remembering episodic details in a different way from how they had earlier reported remembering those details. Experiment 2 generalized these findings to another memory task, eyewitness identification, and demonstrated that blindness to the manipulation, rather than mere exposure to the manipulation, drives subsequent memory change, consistent with previous theoretical and experimental work (Johansson et al, 2014;Sagana et al, 2014;Tousignant et al, 1986). We call this novel consequence of choice blindness on eyewitness memory memory blindness: When witnesses are exposed to manipulated versions of their own memory reports, they often fail to notice the manipulation, and their memories often change to be consistent with those altered reports.…”

“…Johansson et al (2014) found that when participants selected which of two faces they found more attractive, if they were then exposed to the choice blindness manipulation, many would later find the initially unselected face to be more attractive. In other words, the manipulation caused a change in preference.…”

“…However, several recent studies have investigated whether choice blindness might have lasting effects (Johansson, Hall, Tärning, Sikström, & Chater, 2014;Merckelbach, Jelicic, & Pieters, 2011). The theoretical importance of this question is immense: The choice blindness literature has shown that people can often be misled in the short term about their own preferences, but these more recent studies demonstrate that this simple manipulation can often have lasting consequences on peoples' attitudes and behaviors.…”

“…However, this analysis may be misleading, since it aggregates participants in the manipulated condition who detected the manipulation with those who were blind to the manipulation (Johansson et al, 2014). For detectors, only 13.3 % changed from Lineup 1 to Lineup 2.…”

Covert digital manipulation of vocal emotion alter speakers’ emotional states in a congruent direction

“…These conditions allow us to conclude that the feedback is the cause of the directional emotional change observed in our study. As such, our result reinforces the wider framework of self-perception theory: that we use our own actions to help infer our beliefs, preferences, and emotions (34,35). Although we do not necessarily react the same way to emotion observed in ourselves and that observed in others, in both cases, we often use the same inferential strategies to arrive at our attributions (12, 36, 37).…”