False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes.

Abstract

In times of increasing polarization and political acrimony, fueled by distrust of government and media disinformation, it is ever more important to understand the cognitive mechanisms behind political attitude change. In two experiments, we present evidence that false beliefs about one's own prior attitudes and confabulatory reasoning can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes. In Experiment 1 (N = 140), participants stated their opinions about salient political issues, and using the Choice Blindness Paradigm we covertly altered some of their responses to indicate an opposite position. In the first condition, we asked the participants to immediately verify the manipulated responses, and in the second, we also asked them to provide underlying arguments behind their attitudes. Only half of the manipulations were corrected by the participants. To measure lasting attitude change, we asked the participants to rate the same issues again later in the experiment, as well as one week after the first session. Participants in both conditions exhibited lasting shifts in attitudes, but the effect was considerably larger in the group that confabulated supporting arguments. We fully replicated these findings in Experiment 2 (N = 232). In addition, we found that participants' analytical skill correlated with their correction of the manipulation, whereas political involvement did not. This study contributes to the understanding of how confabulatory reasoning and self-perceptive processes can interact in lasting attitude change. It also highlights how political expressions can be both stable in the context of everyday life, yet flexible when argumentative processes are engaged. (PsycINFO Database Record

Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty

“…For this analysis, we set a very weakly informative prior (normal distribution with mean = 0 and SD = 10) (7). Drawing on previously published methodology and code (8,9), we analyzed studies 1-5 sequentially and then used the final prior as the basis for analysis of study 6. We found the highest density interval (HDI) interval of the standard effect size estimate (for the percent of people cheating per condition) to be [−0.07, 0.14], and 88% of the posterior distribution falls within the ROPE.…”

Is choice blindness a case of self-ignorance?

“…The choice-blindness effect has been studied in a variety of contexts, from consumer choice and aesthetic judgement to moral and political attitudes, by Petter Johansson, Lars Hall, and their colleagues at the Choice Blindness Lab (e.g., Hall and Johansson 2009;Hall et al 2010Hall et al , 2012Hall et al , 2013Johansson et al 2006Johansson et al , 2008Strandberg et al 2018). The most common way to characterise the surprising results of the application of the choice-blindness paradigm is to say that, due to experimental manipulation, an agent can sincerely provide articulate and convincing reasons for a choice she did not make, and this is particularly striking because the choice defended with reasons is in tension with the choice the agent actually made just moments earlier.…”

“…In the choice-blindness literature people's future behaviour is aligned with their new attitudes or preferences which is evidence that their new attitudes and preferences are not just 'empty talk'. One of the most recent choice-blindness studies (Strandberg et al 2018) examines in detail the longevity of the preferences induced by the experimenters using the self-transforming questionnaire. Participants are led to form new preferences about health, education, or the environment, and a relationship is found between the persistence of the new preference and the amount of reason giving the agent engaged in at the time of justifying the alleged choice.…”

How Decisions and the Desire for Coherency Shape Subjective Preferences Over Time

“…This is because we tend to lack introspective access to the mechanisms driving our behavior, meaning that we have to post-rationalize in order to make sense of it 2,3,[5][6][7] . In a dramatic demonstration of this, people have been tricked by mischievous experimenters into justifying choices that they did not actually make [8][9][10] . For example, after choosing their favourite flavour of jam in a taste test, participants were tricked into then justifying a different choice by experimenters, who covertly switched them mid-way through the experiment 8 .…”