Choice Blindness Essay

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

“There was no big-screen television or voice-controlled computer. Just a math book, a pad of yellow paper.” (p.109) . Justin also wears thick glasses. Justin has an eye problem which couldn’t be healed in a world without free trade. But as Dave tells the reader, Justin is only wearing the glasses because the “people Upstairs” made this happen. Justin normally doesn’t wear glasses at all, he “would have lost his eyesight entirely”.(p.110) The company Merck will only be able to develop the medicine Justin needed in a world of free trade. Otherwise America would be too busy by doing everything for itself and there wouldn’t be “enough people, machines, and land to go around to make everything as cheaply as could be made under free trade.”(p47)

Humans live in a world in which every day they encounter numerous choices. The way they decide and the outcomes of their decisions define their lives. Their day to day life essentially revolves around the choices they make. As a whole, a community benefits or suffers from the outcomes of its choices. Freedom of choice is the grant to an individual or community to make its own choices out of free will and without restrictions (Pereboom,2003). This is essay will discuss that though freedom choice leads to variety in life, it does not necessarily guarantee satisfaction. It will also argue that although some choice is undoubtedly better than none, more is not always better than less. It will then consider the implications of the paradox of

False memories are an apparent recollection of an event that did not actually occur. The reason why false memories happen are due to the fact that one's brains can only handle so much.There has been several experiment pertaining to the phenomenon, to find how it works.In the next part of the experiment the psychologist showed the participants a word list.False memories are very common and can happen to anyone. On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them.False memories are so common that they affect all of a person's memories. False memories can be made more clear by others memories or they could become more distorted. False memories have caused many wrongful convictions. A psychologist

The phenomenon of explaining false memory occurrences is rising. Researchers have developed a paradigm known as “Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm” in efforts to examine false memories in depth (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). In the DRM paradigm, participants are introduced to and asked to memorize a list of correlated words congregating towards a vital subject word that is never introduced (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The rate that participants recall this false decoy is alarming. Researchers have provided several explanations to explain for the false memories in the DRM paradigm (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The two most notable in explaining false memories in the DRM paradigm are the fuzzy-trace theory and the activation/monitoring theory (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). While the two theories are particularly dissimilar, they both sustain that information developing throughout list encoding attributes an essential part in false memory construction (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011).

False memories created by non-presented akin words demonstrating the vulnerability of memory to being interfered.

False memories can consist of either remembering items or events that never happened, or remembering them differently from the way they actually occurred. The DRM paradigm has been extensively analysed, and it has been concluded that participants readily recall words that are associated with presented lists, however, not presented in the lists. This phenomenon is known as false recall. The 240 participants in the study, were orally presented with 6 lists of semantically related words that contained 15 word per list, presented to them in a male voice recording with each word being presented in a one second rate. They were later asked to write down the words they remembered in any order just like the previous literature study Louis C. Sanford, John E. Fisk, 2009, where the participants were asked to verbally recall the words, and it was later concluded that extraverts falsely recalled more critical lures and non-critical words relative to the other two groups and that the DRM paradigm may be developed by an automatic spread of activation from presented words to critical lures.

False memories have been the subject of many studies since Deese (1959) investigated their effects.

Experiment 1 results found that many of the students failed to remember the initial data provided to them at the onset of the study, which provided the effect of misinformation on the memory of the participant: “These analyses revealed a significant main effect for misinformation items, F(1, 163) = 9.89, p = .002, ηp2 = .06, 90 % CI for effect size = [.01, .12] (Cochran et al, 2016, p.721). This data confirms that the students had not retained the original memory of the crimes committed, which resulted in a large-scale choice blindness. In this manner, the multiple –choice segment of this study exposed memory lapses as part of the re-evaluation process of the participant 's memories. Therefore, misinformation was not properly identified in the remembrance of these criminal scenarios.

Memory does not work like a video camera, smoothly recording every detail. Instead, memory is more of a constructive process. We remember the details that we find most important and relevant. Due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the assimilation of old and new information has the ability to cause vulnerable memories to become distorted. This is also known as the misinformation effect (Loftus, 1997). It is not uncommon for individuals to fill in memory gaps with what they assume they must have experienced. We not only distort memories for events that we have observed, but, we may also have false memories for events that never occurred at all. False memories are “often created by combing actual memories with suggestions received from

They can remember what they had for lunch on an exact date 10 years ago, the weather and conversations they had. Moreover, HSAM individuals remember this detail without the aid of mnemonic techniques, diaries, refreshing information, or categorising and cataloguing experiences. This fuelled the idea that perhaps there are people immune to false memories.

The article is about false memory. The researchers are trying to find out the effect of planting positive false memory in an individual. The authors of the article are; Cara Laney from University of Leicester, Erin K. Morris from University of California, Irvine, Daniel M. Bernstein from Kwantlen University College and University of Washington, Briana M. Wakefield from University of

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.

Choice blindness in sociology has been defined by Petter Johannson as “the finding that participants both often fail to notice mismatches between their decisions and the outcome of their choice and, in addition, endorse the opposite of their chosen alternative” (Hall & Johannson,”Cognition”). Petter Johannson is currently a researcher at one of Europe’s largest and most prestigious colleges, Lund University in Sweden Here Johannson who received his Ph.D. in cognitive science at the University in 2005, runs the Choice Blindness Lab with Lars Hall who also has a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Lund University.(Johannson, "Choice Blindness Experiment Research Paper Questions", 2017) In the lab, the two men have been working to figure out just how common choice blindness is and the effects that it can have.

According to the article, false memories are frequently created by combining suggestions received from others with actual