How Contextual Similarity And Presence Influence The Detection Rates In A Choice Blindness Task

Choice Blindness (CB) is a decision-making phenomenon, revealing that human respondents fail to notice the mismatch between what they choose and what that they actually get (Johansson et al., 2005). Traditional attempts to explain the CB phenomenon are derived from the classical theories of decision-making, assuming reasoning errors on the part of the decision agents. In this study, we investigated the CB paradigm highlighting the importance of contextual and behavioural factors for preference formation and elicitation. Apart from making a theoretical contribution to the study of CB, we offer a methodological extension by introducing response times. Our results show that psychological factors such as level of similarity between the stimuli and physical presence of another individual during the decision-making process influence detection rates and decision-making time. These findings are discussed in light of the recently proposed simplicity framework and cognitive effort/ engagement in decision-making (Kusev & van Schaik, 2013).