Choice blindness (Johansson et al. 2005)

The face experiment: choose which of two faces is more attractive; by sleight of hand the experimenter hands over the REJECTED face and asks "why did you choose her?" Most swaps go undetected (overall detection roughly a quarter of trials in the original, even without time pressure) — and subjects fluently justify the choice they never made, citing features only the swapped face has ("I like her earrings" — the chosen face wore none). (Johansson, Hall, Sikström & Olsson 2005, Science; Hall et al. jam/tea 2010; moral/political attitudes 2012–2013.)

Out of the lab: supermarket jam/tea swaps mid-tasting (~2/3 undetected); moral and political survey answers swapped — respondents defend the position opposite to the one they marked, and for some the defended position STICKS afterward (choice blindness as attitude change).

The linguistic kicker: confabulated justifications are statistically indistinguishable from genuine ones in specificity, emotionality, and confidence.

Read backwards for the real lesson: not "preference → choice → reasons" but "the world tells me what I chose → the interpreter generates preference and reasons to match." Reasons are downstream of APPARENT choice; the choice only needs to look like yours.

Kin: telling-more-than-we-can-know · left-brain-interpreter · abduction (stage one run alone, output entered as observation).