Imagine selecting your favorite face from a pair of pictures, and being given the other picture but then being asked to justify this response — without realizing you’ve gotten someone else’s photo. This striking psychological illusion, known as choice blindness, shows that we can often miss it when what we chose is not what happened or was there all along. “Our lack of awareness about our own decisions is fundamental and has far-reaching implications,” said Adam Bear, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Huron University College in Canada.
Discovering the Phenomenon
Lars Hall and Petter Johansson first demonstrated choice blindness in 2005 using clever experiments on facial attractiveness ratings. In each experiment, the subjects picked the more attractive face from pairs of photographs, and researchers secretly replaced those images before asking people to justify why they had selected one over the other. Strikingly, the print I patients were largely unaware of the manipulation and gave reasons as to why they chose faces that they had in fact rejected.
This ground-breaking work showed that the introspective access that we have to our decision making is much more limited than is commonly believed. This is because we often build reasons for our choices in hindsight, rather than being able to tap into real memories of the reasoning we had when making them.
Mechanisms Behind Choice Blindness
- Inattention Processing: A great deal of what we do is made unconsciously in decision processes that never reach consciousness
- Confabulation: The brain constructs plausible rationales for decisions absent the true decision-making memories
- Change Blindness: In the same way that we are usually blind to changes in our environment, such as when someone disappears and is replaced by another person while you load groceries into your car, we often fail to notice changes in our own choices.
- Cognitive Load: Busy and hurried decisions are more prone to choice blindness since conscious oversight is lessened
- Constructing Preferences: Instead of retrieving some stable preference from somewhere in memory, we often construct the one that we need on the fly given currently available information.
Real-World Implications of Choice Blindness
Choice blindness transcends the laboratory into high-stakes, real-world choices. “The votes are completely symbolic so most individuals just vote as they would have if the votes were not manipulated,” says Szopinski. If nothing else, consumer data shows just how easy it can be to influence a buying decision without someone even knowing. Selection of relationships in dating situations also show that individuals can justify their attractions to people they previously did not like.
Awareness of how our minds deceive us can even be handy in a field as far removed from art and advertising as sports betting. Fans might believe they’ve followed their instincts all along, but the phenomenon of choice blindness demonstrates how decisions can be changed by frame effects, social pressure or even changing odds — like those in NBA Odds — without people ever becoming aware.
Subjective decision-making in areas such as medicine, finance and law could be potentially open to choice blindness effects under time pressure or cognitive load. This has important consequences for responsibility and quality of decisions during high-stake contexts.
The Paradox of Self-Knowledge
Choice blindness challenges the intuition that we have special access to our own mental processes. It does at least indicate that self-consciousness is far more restricted and reconstructed than we often take it to be. According to the alternative view, our narrative identity—that sense of solid selfhood—is driven by post-hoc storytelling far more than it is by accurate memory of how we actually made decisions and reasoned.
This raises deep questions about free will and personal accountability. If we don’t always heed our own decisions, how can we be responsible for them? How much can we trust our explanations for our behavior if they are more often something we make than something we recall?
Factors That Reduce Choice Blindness
- Attention: Actively attending to the process of making decisions can reduce blind spot effects.
- Deeply held values : preferences based on deeply held values are less prone to manipulation.
- Lower Cognitive Load: Simple decisions made with sufficient time to process are less likely to exhibit choice blindness
- Awareness: Knowledge of the phenomenon can enhance sensitivity to choice manipulation
- Delayed Feedback: Providing a gap between choice and explanation allows greater opportunity for retrieval of decision memories
Wrapping Up
Choice blindness shows the startling weakness of our self-awareness, and how a lot of what we tell ourselves about why we make decisions may be pure fantasy. We don’t really “know” why we make the choices we do; instead, we sort through evidence and construct reasons that seem credible based on what’s happening around us at the time. Recognizing this constraint on self-knowledge offers at least 120 more humility about what we can know introspectively and should encourage greater attentiveness to the choices we ourselves are making, including their repercussions in these high-stakes primary life commitments.
