Me, I vote for clairvoyance. Moreover, I foresee that some people
are going to ask the following question:
Uh, what's the reference for this?
To which I predict the answer is:
Bear, A., & Bloom, P. (2016). A Simple Task Uncovers a Postdictive
Illusion of Choice. Psychological Science, 0956797616641943.
And I predict that people can get a copy of this article at:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adam_Bear/publication/301720618_A_Simple_Task_Uncovers_a_Postdictive_Illusion_of_Choice/links/572cb56f08ae3736095a32df.pdf
However, I cannot predict the answer to the following question:
Where did the paragraph below that looks like an abstract but is not
come from?
The abstract from the article is:
|Abstract
|
|Do people know when, or whether, they have made a conscious
|choice? Here, we explore the possibility that choices can seem
|to occur before they are actually made. In two studies, participants
|were asked to quickly choose from a set f options before a randomly
|selected option was made salient. Even when they believed that
|they had made their decision prior to this event, participants were
|significantly more likely than chance to report choosing the salient
option
|when this option was made salient soon after the perceived time of
|choice. Thus, without participants' awareness, a seemingly later event
|influenced choices that were experienced as occurring at an earlier
|time. These findings suggest that, like certain low-level perceptual
|experiences, the experience of choice is susceptible to "postdictive"
|influence and that people may systematically overestimate the role
|that consciousness plays in their chosen behavior.
I provide the abstract to highlight a contrast between it and the
paragraph
below: the abstract reports 2 studies but the paragraph below reports
only one, the first experiment that was presented. I point this out
because
the reason why a second experiment was done is that the mathematical
model fit to the data in Exp 1 suggested that even at longer latencies,
there
would be a positivity bias. Quoting the article:
|This model also estimated that as delay got longer, the
|probability of choosing the red circle approached .2255,
|which is significantly greater than the .20 chance level,
|z = 2.95, p = .003. Thus, participants in this study were
|slightly biased to choose the red circle even on longer
|trials, in which postdiction was unlikely to take place.
|This bias might be explained by a minority of choices
|being made late enough in time that they were still susceptible
|to a postdictive bias, or participants may have
|had a simple response bias to sometimes say they had
|chosen the red circle even when they had not (e.g.,
|because they were lying or had made weak commitments
|to their original choices).(page 4)
So, Exp 2 was done to eliminate this possibility and chance
was no longer defined as p= .20 but p= .50 because the
nature of the task was different (though the results were
supportive of the general conclusion).
However, on page 7 where the authors reports the results of
a logistic regression to test whether degree of reported
confidence in one's answer was related to a person saying
"Yes" (a color change occurred) nor did the reciprocal
of delay (the key independent variable). The only question
I have is "What is the level of statistical power associated
with these tests?" I mean, we all are now about the
Neyman-Pearson thang with confidence intervals and stuff,
shouldn't we report the statistical power associated with
tests as well? Perhaps the problem of the questionable
validity of retrospective power analysis (instead of prospective
power analysis -- but here the researcher must commit to
specific population distributions and effect sizes but most
researchers don't have a clue about either) prevents this.
Anyway, let the replications commence! ;-)
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
P.S. Bem is still wrong. ;-)
------ Original Message -----
On Tue, 24 May 2016 10:01:33 -0700, Christopher Green wrote:
Somehow I think that Darryl Bem would have interpreted these results
differently. :-)
This might make an interesting classroom example of how interpretation
continues to matter, even in science. It's not only crucial experiments
and
statistical analyses.
A Simple Task Uncovers a Postdictive Illusion of Choice
Adam Bear and Paul Bloom
We like to believe that we know when we've made a choice, but research
suggests
that this perception may sometimes be an illusion. In one computer task,
five
white circles appeared in random positions on screen, and participants
were
asked to predict as quickly as possible which one would turn red. After
a
circle did turn red, participants indicated whether they had chosen
correctly.
As the delay between prediction and outcome shortened, participants'
reported
accuracy increased above chance levels (i.e., 20% correct). The findings
suggest that although participants believed that they chose before the
circle
turned red, the events actually happened in the reverse order. When the
delay
was brief, participants may have unconsciously perceived the red circle
before
making their prediction, boosting their accuracy above chance. The
findings
provide evidence that people can subjectively experience having made a
choice
before it occurred.
---
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