On knowing and motivating one's choices - Markers of uncertainty and cognitive load in manipulated choice reports

Abstract: The Choice Blindness-methodology has introduced a novel way of investigating the properties of confabulation in introspective verbal reports. Johansson et al (2005a) showed participants 15 picture-pairs of female faces and asked them to, for each pair, choose the one they found most attractive. By asking participants to motivate their choices and by, unknown to the participants, manipulating the outcome of some of these choices, the experimenters have shown that it comes quite naturally to a normal person to motivate a choice he or she manifestly did not intend to make. This thesis aims at investigating such manipulated choice-reports by comparing them with the non-manipulated choice-reports from the same experiment. It is shown that while there are differences between manipulated and non-manipulated choice-reports, these are few and difficult to interpret.