Trust is central to social behavior. In interactions between strangers some information about group affiliation is almost always available. Despite this, how group information is utilized to promote trust in interactions between strangers is poorly understood. Here we addressed this through a two-stage experiment where participants interacted with randomly selected members of two arbitrary groups and learnt their relative trustworthiness. Next, they interacted with four novel individuals from these two groups. Two members, one from each group, acted congruently with their group’s previous behavior while the other two acted incongruently. While participants readily learnt the group-level information in the first phase, this was swiftly discounted in favor of information about each individual partner’s actual behavior. We fit a reinforcement learning model which included a bias term capturing propensity to trust to the data from the first phase. The bias term from the RL model predicted participants’ initial behavior better than their expectations based on group membership. Pro-social tendencies and individuating information can overcome knowledge about group belonging.

Using a choice blindness paradigm, it is possible to switch decisions and outcomes in simple choice tasks. Such switches have been found to carry over into later choices, hypothesized to be mediated by beliefs about earlier decisions. Here we investigated participants’ memories for stimuli in a simple choice blindness task involving preferential choices between pairs of faces. We probed participants’ recognition and source memory following a round of choices where on some trials participants were presented with the opposite face to the one they actually selected. We found no effect on recognition memory accuracy. Source memory was impaired such that participants failing to detect the manipulation later misremembered recognized non-chosen faces as being previously chosen. The findings are discussed in the light of self-perception theory and previous work on how beliefs affect memories for choices

Choice blindness is a puzzling phenomenon, showing how people often fail to detect a mismatch between their intentions and outcomes and then confabulate reasons for choices they never made. Despite extensive replications, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underpinning it. To tackle this question, we report an online experiment showing for the first time that people still illusorily self-attribute unchosen outcomes despite being explicitly instructed to detect false feedbacks. Comparing standard implicit choice blindness with our new explicit task, we show how prior beliefs about manipulations and stimuli discriminability influence detection. Building on these results, we sketch a preliminary Bayesian model of choice blindness suggesting that choice blindness occurs when beliefs in the reliability of feedback override monitoring related cues indicative of a mismatched outcome. Finally, we discuss practical advantages of explicit task to study choice blindness and implications for the sense of agency and self-knowledge.

Choice blindness is a cognitive phenomenon describing that when people receive false feedback about a choice they just made, they often accept the outcome as their own. Little is known about what predisposes people to correct manipulations they are subjected to in choice blindness studies. In this study, 118 participants answered a political attitude survey and were then asked to explain some of their responses out of which three had been manipulated to indicate an opposite position. Just over half (58.4%) of the manipulations were corrected. We measured extremity, centrality and commitment for each attitude, and one week prior to the experiment we assessed participants’ preference for consistency, need for cognition and political awareness. Only extremity was able to predict correction. The results highlight the elusiveness of choice blindness and speak against dissonance and lack of motivation to engage in cognitively demanding tasks as explanations why the effect occurs.

The role of intentions in motor planning is heavily weightedin classical psychological theories, but their role in generat-ing eye movements, and our awareness of these oculomotorintentions, has not been investigated explicitly. In this study,the extent to which we monitor oculomotor intentions, i.e.the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location,and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience,is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developedwhere a pair of faces moved systematically across a screen.In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon asthe participants attempted to gaze at one of the faces, prevent-ing them from ever viewing it. The results of the experimentsuggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye move-ment intentions in a way that allows for mismatches betweenplanned gaze landing target and resulting gaze landing targetto be consciously experienced during decision-making.

From an evolutionary perspective, it has been proposed that decision making should be sensitive to the overallmagnitude of the alternatives under consideration in order to resolve costly deadlocks and thus improve long-term rewardintake. We provide initial evidence that the overall magnitude of the alternatives affects decision making, by speeding updecision time in order to maximise a speed-value trade off. Implications for current computational models of decision making,in particular for the Drift Diffusion Model, are discussed.

False feedback on choices has been documented to inducelasting preference change. Here we extend such effects to thepolitical domainand investigatethetemporal persistence ofinduced preferences, as well as, the possible role the length ofconfabulatory justifications may play. We conducted a two-day choice blindness experiment using political statements,with sessions being roughly one week apart. Changes inpolitical preferences remained one week after initialresponses, and were most prominent in participants who wereallowed to confabulate freely. These findings, being the firstto demonstrate lasting preference change using choiceblindness, are discussed in light of constructivist approachesto attitude formation through a process of self-perception.