AIM Framework glossary
Choice Blindness
Canonical definition
Choice blindness is the empirically demonstrated phenomenon where Individuals, when presented with choices they did not actually make (via experimental manipulation), fail to notice the switch and confidently generate justifications for the choice they did not select, revealing that the link between choice and justification is weak and post-hoc rather than causally tight and introspectively transparent.
Explanation
In Johansson et al.'s (2005) experiments, subjects chose between options (e.g., photographs of faces), but through sleight of hand, experimenters swapped their choice for the non-chosen option and then asked them to explain their choice. Most subjects failed to notice the swap and immediately generated coherent justifications for the option they had rejected seconds earlier. This demonstrates that (1) people do not have reliable introspective access to the reasons for their choices, and (2) justifications are constructed on-demand after the fact from plausible-sounding narratives, not retrieved from memory of the actual decision process. Choice blindness is direct evidence for the confabulation mechanism: the narrative system will rationalize whatever choice is presented to it, regardless of what actually motivated the selection. For AIM, this validates the claim that conscious explanations of Source ("I wanted this because...") are unreliable and that behavioural signatures provide better evidence than introspection.
Epistemic status
Established Neuroscience.