The Magic Moral Survey: Choice blindness in the moral domain

Abstract: It has been argued that the choice blindness effect is only present in quick and intuitive tasks such as preference decisions for faces or shapes, and not when it comes to more important and deliberative decisions involving issues like moral, political or religious beliefs. To answers this criticism, using a method inspired by close up magic, we investigated whether participants would notice changes made to previously evaluated moral dilemmas, and also if these manipulations would in any way affect the participants' explanations of their previous evaluations. Few participants detected the changes, and many also gave confabulatory answers when asked to explain their choices. These results shows that the choice blindness effect persists also for more important tasks like moral choices, and it suggests that the choice blindness paradigm is a viable research tool for many other forms of decision making.