Choice blindness and trust in the virtual world

Choice blindness is the experimental finding that people may miss changes to the outcome of their actions. This effect has been demonstrated in decision tasks concerning attractiveness of faces, as well as smell and taste of different consumer products. But so far, choice blindness experiments have only been done in the “physical” world, using real objects like photographs. Here we extend this research by demonstrating the choice blindness effect in the virtual world of computers. An important component of this study is that we emulate the social interaction from the original studies by letting a virtual agent run the experiment, presenting the choice alternatives and performing the manipulations.