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LIT-1417: Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1398) in full, with its Supporting Online Material, from the authors' posting of the final published version on the Lund University Cognitive Science site; worth reading as the experiment that catches a person giving reasons for a choice they did not make: 13% of 354 covertly swapped outcomes were noticed at the time, and the reasons given for the swapped face matched reasons for real choices on every measure but one. Read it knowing that it is one low-stakes task (attractiveness of unfamiliar faces), that detection was counted from spontaneous report by design, that the report comparison is a null on eight coded variables, and that it does not show ordinary reasons to be confabulated, which the authors leave open.
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Tagscognition, self
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1398 — Johansson, Hall, Sikström and Olsson — Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome

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Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S. and Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310(5745), 116–119. doi:10.1126/science.1111709.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1398).

Why this is here

The exchange cited it, with Nisbett and Wilson, for CASE-114, as choice blindness: reasons given for a choice are produced for the outcome presented, even when it is not the one chosen. The abstract agrees.

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