Social cues for experimenter incompetence influence choice blindness

Choice blindness refers to a surprising blind spot we have about choices made only seconds ago. After making a choice between two items, observers presented with the unchosen item may fail to report the incongruence, and even provide justifications for a choice they did not make. Here, we show that this effect is modulated by participant's perception of the reliability of the environment. In three experiments, we introduced cues about the competence or incompetence of experimenters, either during or before the traditional choice blindness phase. When manifest reliability of the experimenter decreased, participants were more likely to report the mismatch between the chosen item and the item presented to them. Our results reinforce the notion that choice blindness is a context-dependent phenomenon, permeable to social cues in the context of psychological experiments. Dataset and the analysis scripts are available at the Open Science Foundation at: https://osf.io/ht769/.