Anna Remington, Hannah White, Jake Fairnie, Vassilis Sideropoulos, Lars Hall and Petter Johansson (2024)
https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2024.2356283
A strange phenomenon in the way people behave is ‘choice blindness’. When someone has made a choice that is sneakily swapped and shown back to us later, we often fail to notice – and even stick with the switched choice. Believing that we already made a choice, might make us justify it to ourselves. Our new study looked at whether autistic and non-autistic people experience choice blindness to the same extent.
Some researchers have suggested that choice blindness just reflects the social demands of taking part in experiments and the nature of participant-experimenter interactions. Autistic people have been shown to be less susceptible to social pressure and conform less with others’ opinions. This might suggest that autistic people would not experience choice blindness.
In contrast to this, our results showed that autistic and non-autistic adults alike experienced similar levels of choice blindness in the task. Both groups spotted changed choices at similar levels. They were as confident of their choices as each other, and there was no difference in how they justified the choices.
There was a difference when asked to remake the same choices. Autistic people were more likely to switch choices when presented with the same options again. The switching could be why decision-making can be more exhausting for autistic compared to non-autistic people and may suggest that autistic people are doing a more thorough exploration of the task.
Overall, however, being autistic – or not – seems to have no part in how good we are at spotting or justifying switched past decisions to ourselves, and choice blindness does not seem to be a solely social phenomenon.
