There’s cognitive strategies that (heuristically) take advantage of the usually-persistent world. Should I be embarrassed, after working and practicing with pencil and paper to solve arithmetic problems, that I do something stupid when someone changes the properties of pencil and paper from persistent to volatile?
What I’d like to see is more aboveboard stuff. Suppose that you notify someone that you’re showing them possibly-altered versions of their responses. Can we identify which things were changed when explicitly alerted? Do we still confabulate (probably)? Are the questions that we still confabulate on questions that we’re more uncertain about—more ambiguous wording, more judgement required?
I don’t have citations handy, but IIRC in general inattentional blindness effects are greatly diminished if you warn people ahead of time, which should not be surprising. I don’t know what happens if you warn people between the filling-out-the-questionaire stage and the reading-the-(possibly altered)-answers stage; I expect you’d get a reduced rate of acceptance of changed answers, but you’d also get a not-inconsiderable rate of rejection of unchanged answers.
More generally: we do a lot of stuff without paying attention to what we’re doing, but we don’t keep track of what we did or didn’t pay attention to, and on later recollection we tend to confabulate details into vague memories of unattended-to events. This is a broken system design, and it manifests in a variety of bugs that are unsurprising once we let go of the intuitive but false belief that memory is a process of retrieving recordings into conscious awareness.
It frequently startles me how tenacious that belief is.
There’s cognitive strategies that (heuristically) take advantage of the usually-persistent world. Should I be embarrassed, after working and practicing with pencil and paper to solve arithmetic problems, that I do something stupid when someone changes the properties of pencil and paper from persistent to volatile?
What I’d like to see is more aboveboard stuff. Suppose that you notify someone that you’re showing them possibly-altered versions of their responses. Can we identify which things were changed when explicitly alerted? Do we still confabulate (probably)? Are the questions that we still confabulate on questions that we’re more uncertain about—more ambiguous wording, more judgement required?
I don’t have citations handy, but IIRC in general inattentional blindness effects are greatly diminished if you warn people ahead of time, which should not be surprising. I don’t know what happens if you warn people between the filling-out-the-questionaire stage and the reading-the-(possibly altered)-answers stage; I expect you’d get a reduced rate of acceptance of changed answers, but you’d also get a not-inconsiderable rate of rejection of unchanged answers.
More generally: we do a lot of stuff without paying attention to what we’re doing, but we don’t keep track of what we did or didn’t pay attention to, and on later recollection we tend to confabulate details into vague memories of unattended-to events. This is a broken system design, and it manifests in a variety of bugs that are unsurprising once we let go of the intuitive but false belief that memory is a process of retrieving recordings into conscious awareness.
It frequently startles me how tenacious that belief is.