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The Choice Blindness Lab
Sverker
Sikström, Betty
Tärning, Petter
Johansson, Andreas
Olsson, Lars
Hall When
evaluating facial attractiveness, participants may fail to notice a radical
change to the outcome of their choice, according to a study by researchers at
Lund University, Sweden, and New York University. Equally surprising, the
study shows that participants may produce confabulatory reports when asked to
describe the reasons behind their choices. The findings appear in Science, 2005 vol 310 [Download PDF] .
The
authors on this paper are Petter Johansson,
a researcher; Lars
Hall, a researcher; Sverker
Sikström, an assistant professor; all from Lund University
Cognitive Science; and Andreas
Olsson, a researcher in NYU's Department of Psychology.
Researchers
showed picture-pairs of female faces to the participants and asked them to
choose which face in each pair they found most attractive. In addition,
immediately after their choice, they were asked to verbally describe the
reasons for choosing the way they did. Unknown to the participants, on
certain trials, a card magic trick was used to secretly exchange one face for
the other. Thus, on these trials, the outcome of the choice became the
opposite of what they intended.
The
researchers measured whether the participants noticed that something went
wrong with their choice, both concurrently, during the experimental task, and
retrospectively through a post-experimental interview. Less than 10% of all
manipulations were detected immediately by the participants, and counting all
forms of detection no more than a fifth of all manipulated trials were
exposed. The researchers call this effect choice blindness. Theories
about decision-making generally assume that we recognize when our intentions
and the outcome of our choices do not match up, but this study shows that
this assumption is not necessarily correct. By shedding new light on the
links between intentions and outcomes, these results challenges both current
theories of decision making, and common sense notions of choice and
self-knowledge. The
researchers also sought to understand if the verbal reports given by the
participants differed between the faces that they actually chose, and the
ones that they ended up with in a manipulated trial. "Based on common
sense alone one might suspect that the reports given for normal trials and
for the manipulated trials would differ in many ways", said Hall. "After
all, revealing the reasons behind a choice is something we very often do in
everyday life. But revealing the reasons behind a choice we did not make is a
very strange thing indeed." However,
using a variety of measures, the researchers found that the two types of
reports were remarkably similar. "When asked to motivate their choices,
the participants delivered their verbal reports with the same confidence, and
with the same level of detail and emotionality for the faces that that were not
chosen, as for the ones that were actually chosen", Johansson
said. Despite
the intimate familiarity we have with everyday decision making, it is very
difficult to determine what we can know about this process from the 'inside',
by reflection and introspection. A great barrier for scientific research in
this domain is the nature of subjectivity. How can researchers ever verify
the reports of the participants involved, when they have no means of challenging
them? But by using choice blindness as an instrument, the researchers were
able to 'get between' the decisions of the participants and the outcomes they
were presented with. "Our experiment introduces an entirely novel
methodology that can be used to investigate choice and introspection" Hall said.
"This may lead to an improved understanding of the processes behind both
truthful and confabulatory reports'' Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task. Science, 310, 116-119. [PDF] Links: The Sound of Science Radio Interview |
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