Choice blindness: Do you know yourself as well as you think?

When he explained to them what he had done, he was usually met with surprise and often disbelief. The most intriguing cases were those in which people justified the manipulated choice by highlighting something absent in their original choice. “For instance, if they say, ‘Oh, I prefer this face because I really like the earrings,’ and the one they originally preferred didn’t have any earrings, then we can be certain that whatever made them make this choice, it can’t have been the earrings.”