Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 117, Issue 1, October 2010, Pages 54-61
Cognition

Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.06.010Get rights and content

Abstract

We set up a tasting venue at a local supermarket and invited passerby shoppers to sample two different varieties of jam and tea, and to decide which alternative in each pair they preferred the most. Immediately after the participants had made their choice, we asked them to again sample the chosen alternative, and to verbally explain why they chose the way they did. At this point we secretly switched the contents of the sample containers, so that the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what the participants intended. In total, no more than a third of the manipulated trials were detected. Even for remarkably different tastes like Cinnamon-Apple and bitter Grapefruit, or the smell of Mango and Pernod was no more than half of all trials detected, thus demonstrating considerable levels of choice blindness for the taste and smell of two different consumer goods.

Introduction

In Johansson, Hall, Sikström, and Olsson (2005) we demonstrated that participants may fail to notice mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. In the study we showed the participants pairs of pictures of female faces, and gave them the task of choosing which one they found most attractive. Unknown to the participants, on certain trials, we used a card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other. On these trials, the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what they intended. We registered whether the participants noticed that anything went wrong with their choices. Across all the conditions of the experiment, no more than 26% of the manipulation trials were detected. We call this effect choice blindness (for details, see Johansson et al., 2005).

Processing of faces is of great importance in everyday life (Bruce and Young, 1998, Rhodes, 2006, Schwaninger et al., 2003). This suggests to us that choice blindness will generalize widely to other visual stimuli, and even across modalities. But we cannot rule out the possibility that there is something about the hypothesized ‘holistic’ processing of human faces (e.g. Tanaka and Farah, 1993, Tanaka and Sengco, 1997) that prevented our participants from properly categorizing and verbalizing the mismatch between their original choice and the manipulated outcome. Moreover, while it is clear that lasting judgments of attractiveness for human faces can be made within a split second (Olsson and Marshuetz, 2005, Willis and Todorov, 2006), it is possible that a less constrained procedure would have generated a different result.

For these reasons we were interested in investigating whether the phenomenon of choice blindness would extend to choices made in more naturalistic settings. As we see it, consumer choice is a perfect domain in which to test this paradigm. The modern marketplace is an arena where the tug of explicit and implicit influences on the behavior and opinions of consumers are played out in a particularly fierce manner. Recently, psychologist have weighed in heavily on the side of non-conscious influences on consumer choice, both as a general framework of analysis (Chartrand, 2005, Dijksterhuis et al., 2005), and with the discovery of various implicit effects, such as those arising from preference fluency (Novemsky, Dhar, Schwarz, & Simonson, 2007), placebo effects of marketing (Irmak et al., 2005, Shiv et al., 2005), name-letter branding (Brendl, Chattopadhyay, Pelham, & Carvallo, 2005), and from incidental brand exposure in minimal social interactions (Ferraro, Bettman, & Chartrand, 2009). Even the age old claim about subliminal influences on choice behavior has been revitalized in recent developments (Fitzsimons et al., 2008, Winkielman et al., 2005).

At the same time the marketplace is an arena of remarkable vividness and explicitness, where everything is written on the sleeve (or at least in the barcode) of the products on display. In modern societies people not only have a long history of consumption decisions to fall back upon, they also have an enormous repository of symbolic knowledge about the goods available (comparing the average person today to the most knowledgeable 17th century scientist, they probably ought to be considered as scholars of consumer brands and products). But not only this, consumers often have firm opinions about marketing and branding of products as such, and they think and reflect about how these factors influences their own decisions. Thus, one cannot deny that there is some validity to traditional forms of consumer surveys based on introspection, and to the methods of multidimensional sensory rating often used by industry researchers (for different perspectives on this debate, see Chartrand, 2005, Dijksterhuis et al., 2005, Schwarz, 2003, Simonson, 2005, Strack et al., 2006, Woodside, 2004).

However, to establish the actual balance between implicit and explicit processes is a truly daunting task. In this context, choice blindness is a particularly interesting method to use, as it pairs explicit choices with implicit changes. As a method of investigation it elevates inert hypothetical statements to powerful covert counterfactuals (i.e. from what do we think would have happened if they had chosen otherwise, to what actually happens when they get what they did not choose). Instead of just focusing on various influences leading up to the point of decision or retrospective judgments of satisfaction, choice blindness concerns the representational details at the moment of deciding, and to what extent we are introspectively aware of these.

To investigate whether choice blindness would extend to modality specific choices between different consumer goods in a naturalistic setting, we set up a sample stand at a local supermarket, where we invited passerby customers to participate in a blind test to compare either the taste of two paired varieties of jam or the fragrance of two paired blends of tea. In a pretest, using a locally available assortment of jam and tea, we composed candidate pairings roughly matched on color and consistency, and allowed an independent group of participants to rate the similarity of the two alternatives in each pair. In the main study we included one pair from the middle of the distribution and the two most dissimilar pairs from the comparison.1

In order to create a convincing covert exchange of the chosen samples, we created two sets of ‘magical’ jars, lidded at both ends, and with a divider inside. These jars thus looked like normal containers, but were designed to hold one variety of jam or tea at each end, and could easily be flipped over to execute a switch (see Fig. 1).

Based on the piloting and our previous studies of choice blindness we expected to find that participants would fail to notice the mismatch in many of the manipulated trials. Given the gap in similarity between the first pair and the other two, we also expected that a higher detection rate would be found for the less similar pairs. As a part of the choice procedure we instructed the participants to rate how much they liked each sampled alternative. We expected to find a relation between the discrepancy of these likeability scores and the level of detection, such that larger rated differences between the two samples would correlate with higher degrees of detection.

Furthermore, we were interested in studying the effect of incentives on the level of choice blindness. To this effect, half of the participants were offered the chosen sample (either a jar of jam or a package of tea) as a gift to bring home after the completion of the study. We expected that the provision of this incentive would motivate the participants further and increase their attention to the decision process (Hertwig and Ortmann, 2001, Hertwig and Ortmann, 2003), which in turn would lead to a higher rate of detection for the manipulated gift trials. In addition, our setup permitted us to investigate possible indirect influences of the manipulated choices on subsequent behavior. After the participants had made their selection we asked them to rate how difficult they felt it was to tell the two samples apart, and how confident they were about the choice they had just made. We reasoned that the second tasting of the manipulated sample might distort the original memory of the discrepancy of the two options, and that the participants would indicate that they found it more difficult to tell the two samples apart in the manipulated trials than in the control trials. Similarly, we hypothesized that if the participants had any lingering doubts from the experience of the manipulation, this ought to reveal itself as a lowered confidence in the choice.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 180 consumers (118 female) at a supermarket in Lund, Sweden, participated in the study (three participants were removed due to recording problems). The age of the participants ranged from 16 to 80 years (mean = 40.2; std = 20.0). They were recruited as they passed by a tasting venue we had set up in the store. We presented ourselves as being independent consultants contracted to survey the quality of the jam and tea assortment in the shop. The sample stand was located in one of the outer

Results

Counting across all pairs, no more than 14.4% of the jam trials and 13.8% of the tea trials were detected concurrently. An additional 6.2% of the jam and 6.9% of the tea trials were detected retrospectively, and 12.4% of the jam and 11.5% of the tea trials were registered as a sensory-change type of detection. In total, 33.3% of the manipulated jam trials, and 32.2% of the manipulated tea trials were detected. We found significant differences in detection rate between the most and least similar

Discussion

In line with our main hypothesis, the results showed that no more than a third of all manipulation trials were detected by the participants. Thus, in the great majority of trials they were blind to the mismatch between the intended and the actual outcome of their choice, and instead believed that the taste or smell they experienced in their final sample corresponded to their initial choice. Moreover, in two thirds of the trials we classified as detected the participants showed no conscious

Acknowledgements

LH would like to thank The Swedish Research Council, PJ would like to thank The Wenner-Gren Foundation, and SS would like to thank The Swedish Research Council for financial support.

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