Alexandra Mouratidou, Division for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University
Jordan Zlatev, Division for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University
Joost van de Weijer, Humanities Laboratory, Lund University
Every day we make choices, but our degree of investment in them differs, both in terms of pre-verbal experience and verbal reasoning. In an earlier experimental study, participants were asked to pick the more attractive one among two human faces, and among two abstract figures, and later to provide verbal motivations for these choices. They did not know that in some of the cases their choices were manipulated (i.e., they were asked to motivate the item they had not chosen). Against claims about our unreliability as conscious agents (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Johansson et al., 2005), the study found that in about half the cases the manipulations were detected. In the present study, we investigated whether varying degrees of choice investment could be an explanatory factor for such findings. We analysed the verbal justifications of the participants along a set of semantic categories, based on theoretical ideas from phenomenology and cognitive linguistics, and formulated a matrix of eleven markers of choice investment. We predicted a greater degree of investment when motivating (a) choices of faces than figures, (b) manipulated than actual choices, and (c) detected than non-detected manipulations. These predictions were confirmed, but with various strength. This allows us to argue for both consilience and differences between pre-verbal choice investment and the corresponding verbal motivations of the choices made.
References
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.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.