Choice Blindness

Often, especially in issues regarding religion or politics. It seems people make choices with conviction and will even kill or die for it. However, is it really a choice out of conviction? What if our choice becomes our conviction, and we essentially "rewrite the past" to fit our choice? Read on for a fascinating experiment on this subject.

The procedure for this experiment was very simple. The experimenter showed willing participants (about half men, half women) pairs of female faces on playing-card-sized photos, one in each hand. Participants pointed to whichever of the two faces they found most attractive. The experimenter then passed the card to the participants and asked them to describe exactly why they found that face attractive.

But wait, this is a psychology experiment, so there's a twist in the tail.

Sometimes, when the experimenter passed the card to participants, there was a little sleight of hand involved. This resulted in the participant staring at the female face they didn't choose.

So, now some people were being asked to justify a decision that, in reality, they hadn't made. Or most of them were - 13% spotted the trick and their data wasn't analysed as their heightened suspicion might have affected their reports.

Before you read the results, have a think about what you might expect. Surely if we were handed the photo with a face we didn't choose, and didn't notice it wasn't the same face, our enthusiasm would at least be dampened.

Perhaps the information would be processed unconsciously leading to a subtle difference in how we report our inner thoughts. For example, we might be more uncertain or more vague about why we preferred this face. After all we didn't prefer this face!

Results

Analysing participants' reports, they couldn't find any difference between the two groups. Both the participants looking at the photo they chose and those looking at the one they didn't both seemed sure of their reasons, used equal specificity, and equal emotionality. It seemed there was no clue in participants' verbal reports of the old switcheroo.

Petter Johansson and colleagues give this phenomena a snappy new name: choice blindness. This, then, is the idea that under certain circumstances we are actually oblivious to the choice we have made.

This 'blindness' was also seen in participants' actual reports of why they preferred one face over the other. Sometimes there was a bleed-through from one face to the other. For example one person said they preferred the woman because she was smiling. In fact it was their original choice, and not the one they were holding who had a slight smile on her face.

Other times participants appeared to have made up the reason why they preferred one over the other. One person said they preferred a woman wearing earrings. In fact only the woman they were shown was wearing earrings, not the original woman they chose.

A little philosophy of science

For a scientist, this experiment leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth. This is because it relies on drawing a conclusion from an absence; an absence of a difference between the two groups. Scientists frown on this sort of thing because showing that something exists is possible, but showing it doesn't is impossible. Hence, the endless debates over psychic phenomena.

So we have to be cautious about this experiment. Just because there is no difference in the verbal reports between the two groups, a difference could still exist at either an unconscious or even a conscious level.

Nevertheless, I think this experiment does speak to a pervasive human experience. That is, the inability to describe what is attractive about another person. That's probably why we end up using such vague words like 'energy', 'magnetism' or 'electricity'. Perhaps we genuinely don't know.

Read it all from PsyBlog: Choice Blindess

What Makes People Vote Republican?

Here's a follow up to the last post, an article by Jonathan Haidt.

JONATHAN HAIDT is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

...

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

Read the full text from Edge.org

Also, you can take a Morality Test here and see how you rate.