Choice Blindness & Preference

As we’ve been privileged to learn in lecture, preference is not just a matter of choice - it's a universal metric that isn’t necessarily tied to rationality. It is often fluid and depends on the environment in which options are presented. While we would like to think that our preferences are a unique manifestation of our personality and experience, it really is much less complicated than that. Our preferences are continuously being shaped and reshaped by the environment we are in currently. Nothing displays this better than the concept of choice blindness.

At this point in the election cycle, it would seem foolish to think that a voter is going to change their mind before heading to the ballot (or at the ballot for that matter) if they’ve already made up their mind. However, research from the Choice Blindness lab at Lund University has shown that seemingly concrete parts of our mental map such as moral code and political ideology are actually extremely flexible. Choice Blindness itself refers to the fact that we have a tendency to have trouble understanding discrepancies between choices and outcomes and that we are prepared to offer novel explanations for choices we did not make even though we were told we did.

In one study, participants filled out a survey on moral code. Through a “magic trick”, the experimenters administering the survey switched the the participants answers to show a different set of responses than what they had indicated. The results showed that the majority of people did not even notice the switched answers, with some participants giving “coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position.”

In another study at the same lab, participants in a grocery store were asked to choose which of two jams they liked the most. After selecting their preferred jam, the experimenters then gave them another taste of their selected jam and asked them to explain why they liked it. However, the jam flavor was switched to the one they had actually not preferred. The researchers observed a similar effect, with people justifying their decision based on the taste, even though they received the wrong jam.

The takeaway from this is not just that all jams are delicious or that all political opinions are worthless. It is more so that we must consider the importance of the environment in which options are presented. On their own, jam flavor and politics are inherently complicated subjects which we could have separate, much longer discussions about. These topics are then made even more complex because of the fact that we also have to consider the way the environment is also affecting that choice.