Choosing in freedom or forced to choose? Introspective blindness to psychological forcing in stage-magic

We investigated an individual ability to identify whether choices were made freely or forced by external parameters. We capitalized on magical setups where the notion of psychological forcing constitutes a well trodden path. In live stage magic, a magician guessed cards from spectators while inquiri...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2013-03, Vol.8 (3), p.e58254-e58254
Main Authors: Shalom, Diego E, de Sousa Serro, Maximiliano G, Giaconia, Maximiliano, Martinez, Luis M, Rieznik, Andres, Sigman, Mariano
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Biology
Blindness
Choice Behavior
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Decision making
Experiments
Female
Humans
Laboratories
Magic & magicians
Male
Medicine
Memory
Middle Aged
Models, Psychological
Neurosciences
Parameter identification
Physics
Physiology
Psychology
Pupil
ROC Curve
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Spectators
Young Adult
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Summary:We investigated an individual ability to identify whether choices were made freely or forced by external parameters. We capitalized on magical setups where the notion of psychological forcing constitutes a well trodden path. In live stage magic, a magician guessed cards from spectators while inquiring how freely they thought they had made the choice. Our data showed a marked blindness in the introspection of free choice. Spectators assigned comparable ratings when choosing the card that the magician deliberately forced them compared to any other card, even in classical forcing, where the magician literally handles a card to the participant This observation was paralleled by a laboratory experiment where we observed modest changes in subjective reports by factors with drastic effect in choice. Pupil dilatation, which is known to tag slow cognitive events related to memory and attention, constitutes an efficient fingerprint to index subjective and objective aspects of choice.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0058254