Offensive Squid

Here yet again is a topic I've wanted to ask some cog psych folk about, but haven't had an opportunity. I wish MindHacks and BPS Digest had more interaction with readers in the comments. anyway, here is part of a post I made in a couple of places hoping to solicit answers.

An interesting article in MindHacks,
Researchers implant false symptoms, got me to questioning results on choice blindness tasks.

If one were to alter the task so that the participants spent more time discussing their choice, would they be more apt to catch the switch? And, if there was more at stake in the choice, would that also work against the blindness?

Maybe part of choice blindness could be attributed to the transience of the choice. It might be fading out of short term memory by the time the false choice is presented. Altering the stakes to make the participant more emotionally invested as well as asking them to do more intense cognitive processing over it would influence the memory trace and perhaps tend to work against the blindness.

Consider choices with more consequences and more cognitive involvement: a contractor for an expensive project, a doctor making a critical diagnosis.

What if you were to try implanting false choices to an architect who is designing a house. They could work with a client who would be given a set of options and have the architect influence the choice (a is better than b based on what you said about x y and z. client agrees and picks a). Then later the client could be reviewing plans with the architect and pretend like the architect chose b. That's a lot of thought going in to a choice, and you could alter the stakes by tweaking the payment terms from the client.

And one could pick a medical modality for the experiment to vary the stakes drastically. Alter choices based on the severity of a condition so that consequences could range from death to mild discomfort.

…I work on an ecommerce site where people make large purchases. I think it would be interesting if we could get run experiments on people who sign up for usability studies to see how important choice is and how it might relate to choice blindness.

BUT, it had me thinking that this would be even cooler and a little closer to the original choice blindness task I learned about (swapping pictures of people that someone ranked for attractiveness) if you got a company like okcupid to play along. They have a great blog called OkTrends where they post about data mining their customer data. They could totally run experiments on their users. (with informed consent, natch)