Is choice blindness a case of self-ignorance?

Abstract

When subject to the choice-blindness effect, an agent gives reasons for making choice B, moments after making the alternative choice A. Choice blindness has been studied in a variety of contexts, from consumer choice and aesthetic judgement to moral and political attitudes. The pervasiveness and robustness of the effect is regarded as powerful evidence of self-ignorance. Here we compare two interpretations of choice blindness. On the choice error interpretation, when the agent gives reasons she is in fact wrong about what her choice is. On the choice change interpretation, when the agent gives reasons she is right about what her choice is, but she does not realise that her choice has changed. In this paper, we spell out the implications of the two interpretations of the choice-blindness effect for self-ignorance claims and offer some reasons to prefer choice change to choice error.

Choice blindness and choice-induced preference change in groups

“…Our findings follow and build on a growing number of similar results showing that accepting false feedback about past choices influence future choices and behaviors (Johansson et al, 2014;Luo & Yu, 2017;Strandberg et al, 2018;Taya et al, 2014). Recently, Bortolotti and Sullivan-Bissett (2019), suggested two interpretations of the general choice blindness effect. They contrast a 'choice error' interpretation whereby choice blindness reveals that people can be mistaken about their previous choices, with a 'choice change' interpretation whereby choice blindness reveals that people can be manipulated into reversing their choices within minutes of first making them.…”

Reducing Choice-Blindness? An Experimental Study Comparing Experienced Meditators to Non-Meditators

“…The development of better introspective access can be of great help in countering CB. Indeed, a lack of introspection, which is one of the primary explanations for CB, can be caused either by self-ignorance of our choices or ignorance of the mismatched outcomes [ 10 , 11 , 12 ]. In the first case, people do not have complete introspective access and fail in the self-assignment of their own choices [ 10 , 51 ].…”

“…This study reveals the difficulty participants face in detecting manipulations of their initial choices by an experimenter who replaced the picture participants had chosen with one they had not. Some authors have suggested that this effect could be the result of insufficient introspection [ 10 , 11 , 12 ] or an underestimation of the influence of environmental and situational factors [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ].…”

“…The CB paradigm involves giving participants false feedback on their choices, thus creating a mismatch between their intentions and the outcome of their choices [ 9 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 42 , 43 ]. CB occurs when participants fail to notice this discrepancy and produce a confabulatory answer when the experimenter asks for the reason why they chose something that they in fact never chose [ 10 , 44 ]. This effect can occur during simple visual choices (e.g., a choice between two pictures) but also during more complex choices, such as the choice between two objects only discriminated by touch [ 45 ], or the recognition of a verbal declaration (see [ 46 ], in which participants believed they had said something they, in fact, never said).…”

“…Two interpretations of the CB phenomenon are of interest here. CB could be the result of insufficient introspection [ 10 , 11 , 12 ] and of the under-estimation of the influence of environmental and situational factors (environmental factors include the participant’s physical surroundings. Situational factors would instead consist of the general context of the situation they are currently in, such as the fact that they are participating in an online experiment) [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ].…”