Episodes / Episode 01

Episode 01 · November 2, 2026Choice blindness

You'd Defend a Choice You Never Made

People explained why they'd picked a face they had actually turned down. Most of the time, they didn't notice the swap, and the reasons they gave sounded just as sure.

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What you can do

  • Our suggestion Treat your reasons as a good guess, not a record. Feeling sure doesn't prove your decision.No tested fix exists for choice blindness that a person can use alone.
  • Our suggestion When someone tells you what you said or chose, look at the original before you defend it.Drawn from the findings, not tested on its own.

The studies

  1. Johansson, Hall, Sikström & Olsson (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science 310, 116-119. doi.org/10.1126/science.1111709
  2. Johansson, Hall, Sikström, Tärning & Lind (2006). How something can be said about telling more than we can know. Consciousness and Cognition 15, 673-692. doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2006.09.004
  3. Martinez-Conde & Macknik (2017). When free choice is an illusion. Scientific American. www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-free-choice-is-an-illusion/
  4. Hall, Johansson, Tärning, Sikström & Deutgen (2010). Magic at the marketplace. Cognition 117, 54-61. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.06.010
  5. Hall, Johansson & Strandberg (2012). Lifting the veil of morality. PLOS ONE 7(9), e45457. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045457
  6. Strandberg, Sivén, Hall, Johansson & Pärnamets (2018). False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147(9), 1382-1399. doi.org/10.1037/xge0000489
  7. Sagana, Sauerland & Merckelbach (2018). Warnings to counter choice blindness for identification decisions. Frontiers in Psychology 9, 981. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00981
  8. Grassi, Hoeppe, Baytimur & Bartels (2025). Restoring sight in choice blindness. Frontiers in Psychology 16. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1598254

General education, not medical or psychological advice. Illustrations are stylized and don't show real people.

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Episode 03 · November 2026

A Roll of the Dice Changed the Sentence

The first number you hear pulls your answer toward it, even when that number means nothing. Young lawyers who rolled a 9 on loaded dice gave longer sentences than those who rolled a 3.

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Episode 02 · November 2026

Can You Draw a Bicycle?

You feel you understand how something works, until you have to explain it. Over 40 percent of people couldn't draw a bicycle that works, though nearly all of them had learned to ride one.

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