Choice Blindness

[luke wilson]

_http://www.wired.com/2010/08/choice-blindness/

The problem with our sensory world – this “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sights, sounds and smells – is that we put so much faith in it. We believe that the world we experience the world as it is, and that our sensations are an accurate summary of reality.

But that’s a convenient illusion. In fact, it is the one illusion that makes every other perceptual illusion possible. Although we’re convinced that we’re living in an Ingres canvas – full of exquisite detail and verisimilitude – we actually inhabit a post-impressionist painting, rife with empty spaces and abstraction. It’s a world so full of ambiguities that it requires constant interpretation.

I’m most interested in the practical consequences of our sensory flaws. Let’s begin with this clever paper, published earlier this year in Cognition. The study was led by Lars Hall, at Lund University. It was inspired by a 2005 study, led by Petter Johansson, that showed male subjects a pair of female faces. The subjects were asked to choose the face that they found more attractive. Then, the mischievous scientists used a “card trick” to reverse the outcome of the choice. Here’s where the results get a little sad: Less than 30 percent of subjects noticed that their choice had been changed. Our eyes might have preferences, but this doesn’t mean our mind can remember them.

In this latest study, Hall and colleagues sought to extend this phenomenon – it’s known as choice blindness – to the world of smell and taste. (The paper is called “Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea”.) They asked 180 consumers at a supermarket to participate in a quick little experiment. (The scientists pretended to be “independent consultants con- tracted to survey the quality of the jam and tea assortment” in the retail store.) The consumers were told to focus on the taste of the jam and the smell of the tea, and were asked to pick their preferred product when given a variety of different samples. For instance, a participant might be asked to choose between Ginger and Lime jam, or Cinnamon-Apple and Grapefruit. If they were smelling teas, then they might be given a choice between Apple Pie versus Honey, or Pernod versus Mango.

Here’s where things get tricky. I’ll let the scientists describe their method, in which they slyly reversed the preferences of the hapless consumers:

In a manipulated trial, the participants were presented with the two prepared jars. After tasting a spoon of jam from the first jar, or taking in the smell of the tea, they were asked to indicate how much they liked the sample on a 10-point scale from ‘not at all good’ to ‘very good’. While Experimenter 1 solicited the preference judgment, and interacted with the participants, Experimenter 2 screwed the lid back on the container that was used, and surreptitiously turned it upside down. After the participants had indicated how much they preferred the first option, they were offered the second sample, and once again rated how much they liked it. As with the first sample, Experimenter 2 covertly flipped the jar upside down while returning it to the table. Immediately after the participants completed their second rating, we then asked which alternative they preferred, and asked them to sample it a second time, and to verbally motivate [explain] why they liked this jam or tea better than the other one.

At first glance, this seems like a ridiculous experiment. It’s hard to believe that, when asked to choose between Cinnamon-Apple and Grapefruit jam, I wouldn’t notice the difference. Or that, after choosing Mango tea over Pernod, I would fail to realize that I was actually being given Pernod.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened. According to the scientists, less than a third of participants realized at any point during the experiment that their preferences had been switched. In other words, the vast majority of consumers failed to notice any difference between their intended decision (“I really want Cinnamon-Apple jam”) and the actual outcome of their decision (getting bitter grapefruit jam instead).* We spend so much time obsessing over our consumer choices – I just spent ten minutes debating the merits of Guatemalan coffee beans versus Indonesian beans – but this experiment suggests that all this analysis is an enormous waste of mental energy. I could have just gotten Sanka: My olfactory system is too stupid to notice the difference.

What’s most unsettling, however, is that we are completely ignorant of how fallible our perceptions are. In this study, for instance, the consumers were convinced that it was extremely easy to distinguish between these pairs of jam and tea. They insisted that they would always be able to tell grapefruit jam and cinnamon-apple jam apart. But they were wrong, just as I’m wrong to believe that I would be able to reliably pick out the difference between all these different coffee beans. We are all blind to our own choice blindness.

*In the paper, the scientists nicely rebut a variety of counter-explanations, such as that the subjects were too polite or intimidated to say that their choices had been switched.

I think the above is quite scary... Can anyone think of any examples how this 'choice blindness' manifests itself in real life?

They extended this experiment further to "Moral Choice Blindness" where participants are given moral statements to agree/disagree with on a scale rating, then their choices are shown to them but reversed to the opposite statement e.g. A participant who had given the statement above a 7, moderately agreeing with legalized prostitution, now saw a rating of 7 for the opposite statement: “It is morally reprehensible to purchase sexual services in democratic societies where prostitution is legal and regulated by the government.”. They are then asked to explain their positions. About 30% noticed the switch, the rest went on to defend a position they initially had rejected.

_http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/explananda/201209/can-you-explain-your-moral-choices

 

[Carl]

Well yeah, this is one of the reasons why governments can do whatever they want. Nothing changes between elections, yet still people vote. Rich men go round the government and corporate carousel with the most blatant conflicts of interest, and nobody bats an eyelid. One minute we hate Arabs, next minute we hate Russians. "Eating fat is good" becomes "Eating fat is bad", nobody notices. And if they continue their campaign of using gay rights etc as a tool for pushing their twisted version of freedom of expression, we'll someday see "pedophilia is good".


Interestingly I just saw a link to a trailer to a new documentay on this kind of subject:

https://youtu.be/z8mX54O90Tg

 

[obyvatel]

Here is a study on "moral choice blindness".

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0045457
Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey
Lars Hall,
Petter Johansson
Thomas Strandberg

Using the phenomenon of Choice Blindness (CB) as a wedge, we have been able to separate the decisions of participants and the outcomes they are presented with. In aesthetic, gustatory and olfactory choices this has previously allowed us to demonstrate that participants often fail to notice mismatches between what they prefer and what they actually get (hence, being blind to the outcome of their choice), while nevertheless being prepared to offer introspective reasons for why they chose the way they did [22]–[24]. But what about the backbone of attitude research, all those surveys, panels and polls? If CB held across this domain it would create significant strain for our intuitive models of attitudes ( in what sense can attitudes be real if people moments later fail to notice they have been reversed? ), and provide us with a novel source for understanding prediction, persuasion, and attitude change ( how will participants act after they have endorsed the opposite of what they just said? ).

To investigate these issues, we created a self-transforming paper questionnaire on moral attitudes using a methodology adapted from stage magic (see figure 1). The participants were given a survey on either foundational moral principles or moral issues hotly debated in the current media, and their task was to rate on a 9-point bidirectional scale to what extent they agreed or disagreed with each statement. After the participants had completed the questionnaire, we asked them to read aloud some of their answers from the first page, and to explain their ratings to us. However, unbeknownst to the participants, two of the statements they read aloud at this stage were actually the reverse of the statements they had originally rated – i.e. if the original formulation stated that “large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism.”, it was now changed to “large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and internet traffic ought to be permitted as a means to combat international crime and terrorism.”. As the rating was held constant but the direction of the statement was reversed, the participants’ original opinion was reversed as a consequence. Thus, this technique allowed us to expose participants to altered feedback about their previously stated attitude, and to create a situation in which we could record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite moral view of what they stated only moments ago.

The findings were that the CB effect was very much in display. People could argue against the moral choices they had originally made when they were presented with the opposite choice through trickery.

In the discussion section, the authors state

It is easy to summarize the present study; participants express their moral opinions, then moments later many of them are blind to the mismatched outcome and endorse the opposite view. But it is considerably more difficult to explicate all the implications of it. If previously there was the trouble of stated attitudes often not translating into actions, now we have compounded this by showing that moral attitudes sometimes can be reversed moments after they are announced.

The most obvious suggestion to handle this problem would be to disqualify outright all opinions subject to CB as not real. Because how can it be a ‘real’ attitude if we moments later are prepared to endorse the opposite? Thus, absence of CB could be taken as a form of acid test for attitudes, a basic criterion for ‘attitudeness’. However, one would have to carefully consider the implications of such a criterion. In this study, we made an effort to choose a task that our participants would be knowledgeable about, and that would concern and engage them. To claim that half the Swedish population holds no articulated attitudes about the most visible moral issues in the current societal debate is a most uninviting conclusion to draw. Comparing this task to the ‘median attitude study’ in all the research fields and societal functions that trade in survey and rating data (which might solicit our opinions about anything from nasal decongestants, to boxaerobics, to diaper recycling, etc.) it seems the application of a CB-criterion for attitudeness would risk a monumental disqualification of current attitude measurements, and a widespread breakdown of survey psychology (including aspects of our own published work).

Another option would be to blame the scale instead of the participants; to suggest that the original rating simply failed to capture their ‘true’ attitudes. However, paradoxically we would then have to convince the participants themselves of the validity of this critique, because from their perspective they often argue their reversed position very convincingly (as seen in the correlation between their manipulated ratings, and the scores we blindly recreated from the transcripts, illustrated in figure 2). For all we know, had the participants not been debriefed at the end of the experiments, the attitudes we registered in the manipulation trials might had lived on to become persistent features of their ideology.
.................................

[W]e found no effect of the undetected manipulated trials on the expressed confidence of the participants in their choice of jam or tea, and in the current study, even at the extreme ends of our moral scale, a third of all manipulated trials remained undetected (thus leaving open the intriguing possibility of the meta-attitudinal judgments themselves being open for reversals).
...................................

As the discussion above shows, whatever theoretical perspective one brings to the discussion, the notion of opinions instantly reversing through CB creates considerable tension; specifically, for theories of moral attitudes, the current result seem to give support for models where moral decision or judgment is reached through intuition, and the reasons or arguments for the position are mainly constructed through post-hoc confabulation (as for example, the Social Intuitionist Model, [36], [37]). However, if we really had moral gut feelings, a form of spider sense tingling for the different options, it is difficult to envisage why so many of the participants would have failed to notice the reversed alternatives (it truly ought to have felt wrong to them). Thus, these reversals concerning both foundational principles and real world issues suggest that deliberation and argumentation (post-hoc, or not) play a more prominent role in moral judgments than acknowledged by the current crop of sentiment theories.

Framing it this way highlights the intriguing possibility that it might not always be considered an ideal to have the most minutely tuned attitudes, and to consistently notice all CB manipulations. Even if societal standards dictate a moral ought for citizens to educate themselves and form considered opinions about the issues covered in the current study, the complexity of the dilemmas are such that single-mindedness sometimes can invite suspicion (who am I to hold extreme attitudes about the righteousness of the different sides in the Palestine conflict, with its vast historical scope and complexities?). Similarly, while principles are supposed to be the very core of our moral beings, it might be something that only a rigid and legalistic mind actually can adhere to [38]. As argued by [39] with a simple shift of perspective from experimenter to participant, deplorable context ‘dependency’ turns into opportunistic context ‘sensitivity’. In this sense, the results could be seen as unmasking flexibility and openness to change that otherwise would be very difficult to demonstrate among the participants. Thus, while the experimenters remained completely neutral in the interaction, and presented no arguments or support for whatever position the participants presented, the unique dynamic of the experiment was that the participants (unwittingly) brought the full force of their argumentative powers to bear on themselves instead of others. This connects the current study to recent attempts at explaining the function of reasoning and argumentation as primarily being a means of convincing others that whatever conclusion I have reached is the correct one [40]. Furthermore, comparing our methodology to the classic debate about self-perception and dissonance reduction in social psychology [41], [42], CB gives us a novel and simple instrument to vary potential internal and external sources of inference in a dynamic account of attitude change. Hence, it would be interesting to see how the recorded attitude changes in the current study would compare with actual attempts at persuasion. Previous research has indicated how role-playing and consider-the-opposite inductions can alter attitudes [43], [44], but in this case the whole process would play out on an implicit level. Quite possibly, self-persuasion through CB could be more effective than interpersonal efforts at rational argumentation (Hall et al, unpublished data).

There was one reported context though where the reversals of the original choice was detected.

The participants’ self-evaluation of the strength of their moral convictions was not correlated with correction (and neither was age, gender or time spent working on the questionnaire). Thus, participants who believed themselves to hold strong moral opinions in general were no more likely to correct the manipulations. However, the participants in condition two who classified themselves as politically active were more likely to concurrently detect the manipulations when comparing with the politically active participants in condition one (χ21 = 5.72, p<.05, φ = .27). Controlling for this interaction effect, there was no difference in concurrent detection rate between condition one and two. Similarly, if we compare condition one and two with a combined measure of correction (concurrent correction, retrospective correction and reinterpretation of statement), we find no differences between the two conditions. Therefore, unless one is directly involved with the current dilemmas (as the politically active participants in condition two were), level of abstraction does not seem to affect levels of CB.

 

[luke wilson]

I have recently sort of been trying to read up on the 'glitches' and 'biases' we come pre-packaged in. There are many :(.... I wish there was somewhere on the forum, a sort of list of all of them discovered by science and what they are...

Anyways, I started looking at 'inattentional blindness' and/or '"Selective attention" and I think a small portion of it might be connected to 'choice blindness' mainly because in both situations, it depends where your focus is to determine if you'll notice any changes in your vicinity.

For a clear view of selective/inattentional blindness, watch this (it's quite hard/subtle and only Bradley Cooper's character from Limitless will see what is happening). There is also the famous gorilla experiments...

Anyways, back to moral choice blindness and this comment:

Therefore, unless one is directly involved with the current dilemmas (as the politically active participants in condition two were), level of abstraction does not seem to affect levels of CB.

My understanding of the above statement is that those who are involved in current dilemmas are more likely to notice the manipulations? If so, could it be because of where the attention is focused? If these same people were put through a different test, e.g. the consumer choice one, will they be just as likely to notice the manipulation?

Anyways, regarding the biases in the brain/psychology, is their a model of how they all link up together and function in unison to essentially create man as we know today? We can learn about each individually (not that it will help to resolve the situation!) but what about the holistic picture? Does that make sense??

On top of all the other useful threads on the board, there is also this which I found - Why we make mistakes started by Zadius Sky.

Think of all the veritable fun the PTB and 4D STS must have playing with us given all these biases/glitches etc...