Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task

"When we talk about consciousness, there is also the consciousness of self. And this is what this particular article sheds an interesting light on. We each walk around the world, constantly telling ourselves a story. The narrative of our lives is the narrative we use to construct our sense of self, who we are, why we do what we do, why we choose what we choose – everything we do we justify to ourselves. And we have this illusion of stability. We think we know why we did what we did, why we chose what we chose. And what this article does really well is to show that, actually, that sense of self, that narrative, is a lot more fragile than we might normally think. We’re probably updating it on-line all the time. We probably know why we did something because we see what we did – rather than the other way around. OK. So, imagine a researcher is holding up two pictures of women, and you are asked to choose which one is more attractive. You pick one, and the researcher puts the pictures face down. Then he picks up the one you chose, shows it to you again, and asks you to explain why you chose it. Easy enough. But as it happens, the researcher is a magician and, using sleight of hand, he’s switched the pictures and is actually showing you the one you liked less. Surely, you’d say, ‘No, I picked the other one’, right? Well, turns out about one-third of people don’t – they happily go on to explain why they chose the picture they are being shown. In this particular case, the narrative is shaped by the outcome. Now if you look at the paper, you’ll see that not everyone fell for this. But still a huge number of people, if you think about the scenario for this, which is really, really simple. So I would say that at least of those people that fell for it – instead of saying, ‘I have a narrative, I remember I chose that picture, not this one, what’s going on here?’, they’re thinking, ‘Oh, here’s a picture, I’m being told I chose it, I must remember wrong…’ or ‘Something’s wrong here, but I just saw that he picked up the picture that I remember pointing at, it might be different to the one I remember, but it must be one I chose…’ Something like that. I don’t know what’s going on these people’s minds. But what this suggests is that the outcome is a very strong retrospective force in shaping the narrative. So if inattentional blindness had to do with relationship between awareness and perception, this one has to do with the relationship between awareness and memory. Not so much work has been done on choice blindness as inattentional blindness. There’s a lot of scope for finding out what influences it, what makes more or less of it happen. It’s a fairly untapped phenomenon. Also, one last thing I’d like to add: it’s a great example of how stage magic can help us shed light on human psychology. In this case, the key to the experiment working was the experimenter acting as a magician – he had the ability or skill to use sleight of hand where he put the picture face down and he picked up a different one. The whole experiment hinged on that. They didn’t check it, but I think if they’d done the same thing simply using a computer screen showing two pictures, asked which one was chosen, and then just showed the other one on the computer screen, a lot of people would have been more likely to say, ‘No, there’s a glitch in the program, I chose the other one. But in this case they actually saw the person put down the picture and pick it up again and show it to them again, so they remained unaware of the fact it was a different one. Yes, misdirection. Do you know Richard Wiseman ? He’s at the University of Hertfordshire, and is a Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology – which means that he tours the world giving lectures on funny stuff. And he’s a great speaker – he has a YouTube video. He has a great demonstration he does on there – it’s magic essentially, and he has a gorilla suit in the background to show people where he’s coming from…"