Originally published October 10 2005
International research team conducts breakthrough study on the process of decision-making
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Researchers at New York University and Sweden's Lund University conducted a study of decision-making which revealed 80 percent of participants exhibited what researchers called "choice blindness," which essentially means they failed to notice the results of their choice were radically changed.
The authors on this paper are Petter Johansson, a graduate student; Lars Hall, a researcher; Sverker Sikstr�m, an assistant professor; all from Lund University Cognitive Science; and Andreas Olsson, a graduate student in NYU's Department of Psychology.
Researchers showed picture-pairs of female faces to the participants and asked them to choose which face in each pair they found most attractive.
In addition, immediately after their choice, they were asked to verbally describe the reasons for choosing the way they did.
Less than 10% of all manipulations were detected immediately by the participants, and counting all forms of detection no more than a fifth of all manipulated trials were exposed.
Theories about decision-making generally assume that we recognize when our intentions and the outcome of our choices do not match up, but this study shows that this assumption is not necessarily correct.
By shedding new light on the links between intentions and outcomes, these results challenges both current theories of decision making, and common sense notions of choice and self-knowledge.
The researchers also sought to understand if the verbal reports given by the participants differed between the faces that they actually chose, and the ones that they ended up with in a manipulated trial.
"Based on common sense alone one might suspect that the reports given for normal trials and for the manipulated trials would differ in many ways", said Hall.
"After all, revealing the reasons behind a choice is something we very often do in everyday life.
How can researchers ever verify the reports of the participants involved, when they have no means of challenging them?
But by using choice blindness as an instrument, the researchers were able to 'get between' the decisions of the participants and the outcomes they were presented with.
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