Doves appear, a key bends, someone is cut in half and cards magically teleport to impossible locations… Magicians have dazzled and deceived audiences for centuries. Throughout this time, they’ve developed many techniques to manipulate our conscious experiences (e.g. Kuhn, 2019). Distorting our perception, manipulating our attention, even influencing the decisions we make, conjurers’ methods have many links with psychology. These conjuring methods are now regarded as a novel source of insight into the human mind. Indeed, magic tricks provide a valuable toolbox that can help inform scientists about the mechanisms that underpin social, cognitive, developmental and even transcultural processes (Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008).
The conjuring techniques in magic allow us to experience things that we believe to be impossible. Throughout history, conjurers have learnt to use clever psychological tricks to create compelling illusory phenomena that violate our understanding of the world. Magicians have also developed tricks that allow them to push the limits of what their audiences believe is possible. Among other things, they often proclaim that they can insert specific thoughts into people’s minds or unconsciously manipulate their behaviour. This form of magic is known as mentalism, and the context of such performances varies widely. For example, some performers attribute the effects to paranormal and psychic abilities while others frame it as psychological skills such as reading body language or using subtle suggestion techniques. Recently, a subsection of psychological research has used mentalism techniques that have helped researchers identify a curious mechanism: choice blindness.
Imagine walking on a beach on a hot, sunny summer day. You decide to go to an ice cream store and, after considering the flavour options, you order a vanilla cone (double, please!). But... Do you think you would notice if you were given a chocolate one? You bet you would, right? What if you were to buy a new laptop, opted for a specific model after carefully considering all the possibilities, but when you arrive at the cashier, the salesman brings another, more expensive, model. Would you notice this? You probably think you would, however, research shows that most of you wouldn’t! You might even tell me why you chose chocolate or the more expensive laptop. This experience is called choice blindness.
Choice blindness refers to the fact that people often fail to notice the mismatch between their choice (e.g., the vanilla cone) and its outcome (e.g., receiving the chocolate cone), and end up justifying a choice they never made in the first place (Johansson Petter, Hall Lars, Sikstrom Sverker, & Olsson, 2005). In their seminal study, Johansson and colleagues showed participants pairs of faces printed on playing-card-sized pieces of paper. They asked participants to choose the picture that they found most attractive. After the participant had made their selection, they were handed their chosen picture and had to explain their choice.
Credit: Colin Hayes; Source: "Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task," by Petter Johansson et al, in Science, Vol. 310; October 7, 2005.
However, thanks to sleight of hand, the experimenter covertly switched the chosen image for the rejected one (see images above). The results showed that most people fail to notice this change and even generate elaborate justifications to explain why they chose the face they had in fact rejected. These results have now been replicated across different contexts and for diverse items, ranging from jam jars to tea flavours (Hall, Johansson, Tärning, Sikström, & Deutgen, 2010) . The phenomenon seems to be as robust as it is surprising.
But what happens with important choices, with more serious implications? If pictures of faces and jam jars amaze you, political preferences might blow your mind. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that, despite political polarization of American politics, a simple manipulation based on a mentalism technique made people endorse and express less polarized views about competing political candidates in the 2016 presidential election (Strandberg, Olson, Hall, Woods, & Johansson, 2020). Here, participants first completed a paper survey evaluating Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton on various personality traits. After this, a magic technique was used to covertly manipulate the survey so that most of the participants’ answers favouring one of the two candidates switched to a moderate response. Very few participants noticed the change, 94% of them accepted the manipulated responses as their own. Even though they first reported polarized views, these participants rationalised the new neutral position accordingly.
These studies exemplify how magic trick methods can be used to drive novel research. The Choice Blindness paradigm relies on magic methods to perform the switches between participants’ initial choice and the manipulated one. Thanks to these methods, scientists have discovered how false feedback can powerfully change and shape people’s preferences.
Choice blindness phenomenon suggests that a dissociation exists between our preferences and opinions, and their underlying reasons. It seems that sometimes (if not most of the time), we construct the reasons for our choices a posteriori when we have to justify them, rather than constructing our choices on a priori based on pre-existing rational reasons. This also suggests that political opinions and other preferences can be flexible, and depend on situational factors. If we tend to think we constantly make decisions based on personal reasons, in reality, we also interpret our behaviour and infer the reasons for what we chose or did. Thanks to these studies, choice blindness is now a procedure used to study many psychological processes linked to decision-making, mechanisms underlying attitude change, or how we are influenced by false information that appears to be true.
Although these results might sound a bit scary, it also shows that we might be more flexible than we tend to think we are and capable of understanding important matters from another point of view than our initial, personal one. It means our opinions and attitudes are not set in stone and it opens our minds to the possibility of growth. However, if a world of open minds lies behind the curtain of some of our strong preferences and opinions, we still need to find a way in without any sleights-of-hands, tricked jars and magical surveys…
Understanding phenomena like choice blindness not only reveals fascinating insights about the mind but also empowers us to make better decisions and remain open to growth. If you’re curious about how these psychological insights can transform your personal or organizational decision-making, let’s connect. Through workshops and interactive presentations, I help teams and individuals uncover the magic behind the mind—and put it to good use.
References
Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition, 117(1), 54–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.06.010
Johansson Petter, Hall Lars, Sikstrom Sverker, & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decisionce, 310(5745), 116–119.
Kuhn, G. (2019). Experiencing the impossible: The science of magic. MIT Press.
Kuhn, G., Amlani, A. A., & Rensink, R. A. (2008). Towards a science of magic. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(9), 349–354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.05.008
Strandberg, T., Olson, J. A., Hall, L., Woods, A., & Johansson, P. (2020). Depolarizing American voters: Democrats and Republicans are equally susceptible to false attitude feedback. PLoS ONE, 15(2), e0226799. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226799
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