Choice Blindness
Some choices are easy (“Do you want pepperoni or anchovies on your pizza?”) and some choices are hard (“Are you going to get Amazon Echo or Google Home?”), but most of us like to think that we “know our own mind”—that is, when we finally make a choice, we are clear about our decision. Research by psychologists in Sweden shows that this confidence in our own self-knowledge may not always be justified.
choice blindness
Choice blindness is the failure to notice a mismatch between the option you intended to choose and the option you actually receive—and then going on to accept or even justify that outcome as if it were your own choice.
It’s not just forgetting your choice later. It’s failing to notice, in the moment, that the outcome does not match what you chose.
Here are some examples of choice blindness:
- You order chocolate ice cream, but the server hands you strawberry and you accept it without realizing the difference.
- You choose a specific pair of shoes online, but when the page refreshes, a slightly different (more expensive) version is in your cart and you don’t notice.
- You tell a friend you prefer Option A, but when they later describe Option B back to you as “what you picked,” you agree and explain why it’s a good choice.
In each case, you “go along with” an outcome that doesn’t match your original decision.
The Attraction Preference Experiment
Petter Johansson, Lars Hall, and colleagues developed a clever lab method to study choice blindness. Their question: How often do people notice when their chosen option is secretly swapped—and how do they explain their choices afterward?
Here’s how their experiment worked:
- You sit across a table from an experimenter wearing a long-sleeved black shirt.
- On each trial, you see two photographs of faces (same gender).
- You point to the face you find more attractive.
- The experimenter then hands you the card you supposedly chose and asks you to explain why you preferred that person.
But there’s a trick:
- On some trials, using a sleight-of-hand technique, the experimenter switches the cards and hands you the face you did not choose.
- You can see the setup and results described in this BBC clip on decision-making (Horizon series).
Watch this video to see the experimenters explain it.
You can view the transcript for “BBC Choice Blindness” here (opens in new window).
What Did They Find?
- Participants: 120 college students (70 women, 50 men)
- All face photos were of women
- On each trial, participants chose a face and then immediately explained their preference
Results:
- Only about 13% of the switched trials were detected right away.
- About 10% more were flagged later (“retrospectively”)—participants first explained the switched face but later reported suspicion something was off.
- Even when people did notice a swap, they usually blamed it on a technical error, not on the experimental design.
The striking part: most participants confidently explained why they “preferred” a face they had never actually chosen.
From Phenomenon to Scientific Exploration
What you saw in the video is what a scientist would call a phenomenon—that is, a behavior that happens under certain conditions. The video showed that, if an experimenter is tricky enough, they can get people to justify choices that they never made.
What you saw in the video is what scientists call a phenomenon—a reliable pattern of behavior observed under specific conditions. In this case, the phenomenon is that people can:
- Fail to notice when their choice is changed
- Confidently justify that altered outcome as if it were their own decision
Discovering a phenomenon is just the starting point. The deeper scientific work asks:
- Why does choice blindness happen?
- When is it more or less likely to occur?
- What does it reveal about how we construct reasons for our choices?
To answer these questions, researchers systematically change specific parts of the experiment—its independent variables—and observe how that affects the dependent variable, which here is the probability that participants detect the switch.
For example, they might vary:
- How different the faces are
- How much time passes before asking for an explanation
- Whether participants feel rushed or relaxed
By seeing which changes increase or decrease detection, scientists can learn more about the mental processes behind choice blindness and how we understand our own decisions.