The Psychological Mechanism Of Choice Blindness

Choice blindness refers to a person’s failure to detect a mismatch between one’s intentions and the outcome of one’s choice in decision-making task, without their notice. Choice blindness has been aroused the interest of many researchers to explore specific causes and mechanisms, which is a hot and important direction for future research in this field. Yet little is known about the mechanism underlying the choice blindness phenomenon. The objective of this study is to explore the cognitive mechanisms based on memory representation theory through three studies. The study is based on the classic choice blindness paradigm, and choice blindness phenomena is verified in preference conditions and non-preference conditions. Besides, the present article analyzes whether memory representation has an influence on choice blindness through manipulating time and reminding, and also explores the relationship between the failure of representation and memory retrieval.In studies la and lb, the phenomenon of choice blindness was measured in computer. Study 1a showed that the overall detection was 34.29%,10.48% of these detections were categorized under the concurrent category,20.95% in the retrospective and 2.86% in the possible retrospective. The results of study lb also showed that choice blindness existed in non-preference selection.32.35% of the trails were detected and 5.13% were categorized under the concurrent category,7.69% in the retrospective and 15.35% in the possible retrospective.Study 2 attempted to explore the influence of attention and memory in choice blindness. In study 2 a 2 (remind and not-remind) x 3 (time:2s,4s and 6s) between-subjects design was employed. The results show that:(1) remind influences the overall detection, which is higher in remind condition than non-remind; (2) as time increases, the overall detection also becomes grater. (3) the interaction has not impact on choice blindness; (4) the reasons in participants’report is different in real and false feedback.Study 2 indicated that memory representation theory can explain the choice blindness phenomena, but the relationship between the failure of representation and retrieval was still not clear. Study 3 attempted to explore cognitive mechanisms through memory representation theory. After the manipulations, participants had to decided whether the picture was their preference. We analyses the specific choice to find the relationship of the theory based on the three possible reasons of choice blindness. The results were divided into the following four cases for the participants’choice (yes/no) in real preference and false feedback preference:Y/N, Y/Y, N/Y, N/N, which presents detection, failure of extracting, features replacement, feature combination in turn. Four cases above were present, indicating that the memory representation theory may be the psychological mechanisms of choice blindness. And the N/Y and N/N were more than Y/Y, which showed that the failure of representation was the foundation.