Betty Tärning

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

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.

How something can be said about telling more than we can know: On choice blindness and introspection

The legacy of Nisbett and Wilsons classic article, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes (1977), is mixed. It is perhaps the most cited article in the recent history of consciousness studies, yet no empirical research program currently exists that continues the work presented in the article. To remedy this, we have introduced an experimental paradigm we call choice blindness [Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310(5745), 116-119.]. In the choice blindness paradigm participants fail to notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. In this article, we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis (LSA) to investigate a corpus of introspective reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. We contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated vs. manipulated trials, but find very few differences between these two groups of reports.

How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions.

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (±9.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change.

Transferring teaching to testing: an unexplored aspect of teachable agents

The present study examined whether socio-motivational effects from working with a Teachable Agent (TA) might transfer from the formative learning phase to a summative test situation. Forty-nine students (9-10 years old) performed a digital pretest of math skills, then played a TA-based educational math game in school over a period of eight weeks. Thereafter, the students were divided into two groups, matched according to their pretest scores, and randomly assigned one of two posttest conditions: either with the TA present, or without the TA. Results showed that low-performers on the pretest improved significantly more on the posttest than did high-performers, but only when tested with the TA. We reason that low-performers might be more susceptible to a supportive social context - as provided by their TA - for performing well in a test situation.

Reply to commentary by Moore and Haggard

We are very happy to see that Moore and Haggard (2006) welcome the introduction of CBP as a usefulexperimental method for investigating introspection and intentionality, but while they urge caution in theextent of the application of our method, we can do nothing but energetically encourage its use. When Mooreand Haggard write ‘‘in line with Nisbett and Wilson’s hypothesis, the CBP suggests that our introspections areconfabulatory’’, they are not entirely correct. The results of the studies we have done so far using the CPBsuggest that introspections about (some forms of) decisions may (sometimes) be confabulatory. But the par-adigm itself is neutral about this point. In fact, from an analytic perspective we would have preferred to findclear patterns of differences between the NM- and M-reports, because that would have allowed us to startbuilding up a contrast case for different modes of introspective reporting, and to eventually perhaps arriveat a powerful generalization about truthful and confabulatory content. Now, as Moore and Haggard note,we have a more sweeping and difficult hypothesis to test in further experiments, namely that the NM-reportsmay contain lots of confabulatory elements too.What would it mean if this hypothesis were true? We suspect that part of the caution urged by Moore andHaggard about the CBP lies in a general worry that overstating the conclusions of the present findings coulddo wrongful damage to the image we have of ourselves as insightful and rational creatures. However, we feel itis unfortunate that efforts like those of Nisbett and Wilson (1977) and Wegner (2002) often get bundled withthe idea of a demotion of the powers of the human mind. They (and we) are not here to con people or tomanipulate them, but to map out the relationship between the concepts of everyday psychology and scientifictheories of introspection and intentionality. As Dennett (1987) writes:Wewouldbeunwisetomodelourscientificpsychologytoocloselyontheseputativeillata(concreteentities)offolktheory.Wepostulatealltheseapparentactivitiesandmentalprocessesinordertomakesenseofthebehaviorweobserve—inorder,infact,tomakeasmuchsensepossibleofthebehavior,especiallywhenthebehavior we observe is our own...each of us is in most regards a sort of inveterate auto-psychologist,effortlesslyinventingintentionalinterpretationsofourownactionsinaninseparablemixofconfabulation,retrospective self-justification, and (on occasion, no doubt) good theorizing. (p. 91, emphasis in original).

Ascribed gender and characteristics of a visually androgynous Teachable Agent

This paper explores how users ascribe gender to a visually androgynous teachable agent, and if and how the ascribed gender can influence the perceived personality characteristics of the agent. Previous studies have shown positive effects of using agents with more neutral or androgynous appearances, for instance, a more gender neutral agent evoked more positive attitudes on females than did a more stereotypical female agent [1] and androgynous agents were less abused than female agents [2]. Another study showed that even though an agent was visually androgynous, the user typically ascribed a gender to it [3].

Instructing a Teachable Agent with Low or High Self-Efficacy – Does Similarity Attract?

This study examines the effects of teachable agents’ expressed self-efficacy on students. A total of 166 students, 10- to 11-years-old, used a teachable agent-based math game focusing on the base-ten number system. By means of data logging and questionnaires, the study compared the effects of high vs. low agent self-efficacy on the students’ in-game performance, their own math self-efficacy, and their attitude towards their agent. The study further explored the effects of matching vs. mismatching between student and agent with respect to self-efficacy. Overall, students who interacted with an agent with low self-efficacy performed better than students interacting with an agent with high self-efficacy. This was especially apparent for students who had reported low self-efficacy themselves, who performed on par with students with high self-efficacy when interacting with a digital tutee with low self-efficacy. Furthermore, students with low self-efficacy significantly increased their self-efficacy in the matched condition, i.e. when instructing a teachable agent with low self-efficacy. They also increased their self-efficacy when instructing a teachable agent with high self-efficacy, but to a smaller extent and not significantly. For students with high self-efficacy, a potential corresponding effect on a self-efficacy change due to matching may be hidden behind a ceiling effect. As a preliminary conclusion, on the basis of the results of this study, we propose that teachable agents should preferably be designed to have low self-efficacy.

Teaching her, him ... or hir? challenges for a cross-cultural study

This paper discusses some cultural considerations that we stand before in developing and exploiting an agent based educational software for use by Swedish and American students, age 11-14. The reported cultural challenges arise in software develop¬ment, study designs, and decisions on actual pedagogical use in the two cultural settings.