IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0045457.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey

Author

Listed:
  • Lars Hall
  • Petter Johansson
  • Thomas Strandberg

Abstract

Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change.

Suggested Citation

  • Lars Hall & Petter Johansson & Thomas Strandberg, 2012. "Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(9), pages 1-8, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0045457
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0045457
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0045457
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0045457&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0045457?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Beshears, John & Choi, James J. & Laibson, David & Madrian, Brigitte C., 2008. "How are preferences revealed?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(8-9), pages 1787-1794, August.
    2. Szenberg, Michael & Ramrattan, Lall & Gottesman, Aron A. (ed.), 2006. "Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199298839.
    3. repec:cup:judgdm:v:4:y:2009:i:6:p:479-491 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Beshears, John & Choi, James J. & Laibson, David & Madrian, Brigitte C., 2008. "How are preferences revealed?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(8-9), pages 1787-1794, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrés Rieznik & Lorena Moscovich & Alan Frieiro & Julieta Figini & Rodrigo Catalano & Juan Manuel Garrido & Facundo Álvarez Heduan & Mariano Sigman & Pablo A Gonzalez, 2017. "A massive experiment on choice blindness in political decisions: Confidence, confabulation, and unconscious detection of self-deception," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(2), pages 1-16, February.
    2. Cheung, Tracy & Junghans, Astrid & Dijsterhuis, Garmt & Kroese, Floor & Johansson, Petter & Hall, Lars & De Ridder, Denise, 2015. "C(l)ue Me In - Enhancing Consumers' Attention to Ingredient List Information," 143rd Joint EAAE/AAEA Seminar, March 25-27, 2015, Naples, Italy 202723, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
    3. Thomas Strandberg & Jay A Olson & Lars Hall & Andy Woods & Petter Johansson, 2020. "Depolarizing American voters: Democrats and Republicans are equally susceptible to false attitude feedback," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(2), pages 1-17, February.
    4. Somerville, Jason & McGowan, Féidhlim, 2016. "Can chocolate cure blindness? Investigating the effect of preference strength and incentives on the incidence of Choice Blindness," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 1-11.
    5. Lars Hall & Thomas Strandberg & Philip Pärnamets & Andreas Lind & Betty Tärning & Petter Johansson, 2013. "How the Polls Can Be Both Spot On and Dead Wrong: Using Choice Blindness to Shift Political Attitudes and Voter Intentions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(4), pages 1-6, April.
    6. repec:cup:judgdm:v:8:y:2013:i:5:p:577-588 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Patrick O. Waeber & Natasha Stoudmann & James D. Langston & Jaboury Ghazoul & Lucienne Wilmé & Jeffrey Sayer & Carlos Nobre & John L. Innes & Philip Fernbach & Steven A. Sloman & Claude A. Garcia, 2021. "Choices We Make in Times of Crisis," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(6), pages 1-18, March.
    8. Owen McLaughlin & Jason Somerville, 2013. "Choice blindness in financial decision making," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 8(5), pages 577-588, September.
    9. Lotta Stille & Emelie Norin & Sverker Sikström, 2017. "Self-delivered misinformation - Merging the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(3), pages 1-17, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Leonhard K. Lades & Liam Delaney, 2024. "Self-control failures, as judged by themselves," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-14, December.
    2. van Hoorn, André, 2018. "Is the happiness approach to measuring preferences valid?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 53-65.
    3. Ghosal, Sayantan & Dalton, Patricio, 2013. "Characterizing Behavioral Decisions with Choice Data," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 107, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    4. Henrik Serup Christensen & Lauri Rapeli, 2021. "Immediate rewards or delayed gratification? A conjoint survey experiment of the public’s policy preferences," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 54(1), pages 63-94, March.
    5. Alserda, Gosse A.G. & Dellaert, Benedict G.C. & Swinkels, Laurens & van der Lecq, Fieke S.G., 2019. "Individual pension risk preference elicitation and collective asset allocation with heterogeneity," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 206-225.
    6. Hasan-Basri, Bakti & Yahya, Nurul & Musa, Rusmani, 2013. "Status Quo Effect and Preferences Uncertainty: A Heteroscedastic Extreme Value (HEV) Model," Jurnal Ekonomi Malaysia, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, vol. 47(1), pages 163-172.
    7. Hajdu, Tamás & Hajdu, Gábor, 2011. "A hasznosság és a relatív jövedelem kapcsolatának vizsgálata magyar adatok segítségével [Examining the relation of utility and relative income using Hungarian data]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(1), pages 56-73.
    8. Yildiz, Özgür, 2014. "Lehren aus der Verhaltensökonomik für die Gestaltung umweltpolitischer Maßnahmen [Lessons from behavioral economics for the design of environmental policy measures]," MPRA Paper 59360, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Orla Doyle & Liam Delaney & Christine O'Farrelly & Nick Fitzpatrick & Michael Daly, 2015. "Can Early Intervention Improve Maternal Well-being? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial," Working Papers 2015-015, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    10. Belton, Cameron A. & Lunn, Peter D., 2020. "Smart choices? An experimental study of smart meters and time-of-use tariffs in Ireland," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    11. Monika Bütler & Eva Deuchert & Michael Lechner & Stefan Staubli & Petra Thiemann, 2015. "Financial work incentives for disability benefit recipients: lessons from a randomised field experiment," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 4(1), pages 1-18, December.
    12. Stefania Sitzia & Jiwei Zheng & Daniel Zizzo, 2015. "Inattentive consumers in markets for services," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 79(2), pages 307-332, September.
    13. Hazel Bateman & Christine Eckert & Fedor Iskhakov & Jordan Louviere & Stephen Satchell & Susan Thorp, 2017. "Default and naive diversification heuristics in annuity choice," Australian Journal of Management, Australian School of Business, vol. 42(1), pages 32-57, February.
    14. Martin Binder & Leonhard K. Lades, 2015. "Autonomy-Enhancing Paternalism," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 68(1), pages 3-27, February.
    15. Francesca de Petrillo & Alexandra Rosati, 2021. "Variation in primate decision-making under uncertainty and the roots of human economic behaviour," Post-Print hal-03151858, HAL.
    16. Johannes Lohse & Timo Goeschl & Johannes H. Diederich, 2017. "Giving is a Question of Time: Response Times and Contributions to an Environmental Public Good," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 67(3), pages 455-477, July.
    17. Attema, Arthur E. & Brouwer, Werner B.F., 2013. "In search of a preferred preference elicitation method: A test of the internal consistency of choice and matching tasks," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 126-140.
    18. Jaehwuen Jung & Hyungsoo Lim & Dongwon Lee & Chul Kim, 2022. "The Secret to Finding a Match: A Field Experiment on Choice Capacity Design in an Online Dating Platform," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 33(4), pages 1248-1263, December.
    19. V. Smith & Eric Moore, 2010. "Behavioral Economics and Benefit Cost Analysis," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 46(2), pages 217-234, June.
    20. Leites, Martín & Rivero, Analía & Salas, Gonzalo, 2024. "The positionality of goods and the positional concern’s origin," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 109(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0045457. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.