What We Don’t Know About Shopping, Reading, Watching TV and Judging People

Psychology studies that rely on deceiving participants have shown we often have little clue what’’s going on in our own minds. But what about in everyday situations where trickery isn”t involved?

Here are four everyday situations - shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people - and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what’’s really going on in our minds (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

Shopping
For this study researchers set themselves up in a mall pretending to carry out a consumer survey on nightgowns and nylon stockings. Passersby were asked to evaluate what they were told were four different nightgowns and four different pairs of stockings. In fact, all four items were identical.

Quite by accident they discovered a positional effect for the identical goods: people seemed to prefer the item that was on the far right. In fact this effect was really obvious for the stockings. The right-most pair, although identical to the left-most was preferred by a factor of four to one.

When asked why they had chosen a particular item, no one mentioned its position. Even when experimenters suggested to people that the position might have an effect, most participants looked at best very confused and at worst utterly dismissive.

Result: these people didn”t have a clue why they preferred one identical pair of stockings over another.

Reading
In this study participants read a passage from the novel ”Rabbit, Run” by John Updike. The extract from the book involves an emotionally charged scene in which an alcoholic mother, while washing her baby in the bath, accidentally drowns and kills her.

Four conditions were used:
The scene was presented in its entiretyA part of the scene - a description of the baby’’s messy crib - was deleted.A different part of the scene - a physical description of the baby - was deleted.Both (2) and (3)
Afterwards participants rated the emotional impact of the particular passage they had read. Comparing the ratings of the participants in the four conditions showed that there was barely any difference between emotional ratings (certainly nothing statistically significant). It seemed the emotional impact of the extract was unaffected by deleting either or both of these sections.

Then, if they were in condition 2, 3, or 4 participants were shown the parts that had been deleted and asked if it would have made any difference to the emotional impact of the extract if they had been included.

By:  Jerry                        Source