THE PURPOSE OF THE STUDY AND DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE PROJECT COURSE
Results using the choice blindness paradigm (CB) have shown that both moral and political opinions often can be reversed moments after they are stated, with participants instead arguing for the opposite of their previously expressed view. This has created considerable problems for current models of attitudes, and threatens to undermine the foundation of survey psychology. The aim of the project was to help to resolve this conflict by implementing a large scale web based CB project, and to systematically relate levels of CB to (i) cultural context, political awareness, and to psychological measures of individual differences, (ii) explore the role of CB as a novel way to measure depth-of-processing in survey responding, (iii) provide a critical test of meta-attitudinal judgments, such as perceived confidence, ambivalence, and importance, (iv) investigate the relationship between CB and the classification of explicit and implicit attitudes.

BRIEF NOTES ON THE PROJECT EXECUTION
The project was initially delayed due to illness, causing some rescheduling (most notably, to abandon a focus on the UK 2015 election, and instead track the 2016 US election), but then it progressed according to plan, and has provided a wealth of interesting results. During the course of the project there has been shifting standards of review in the field of social psychology, with a greater focus on methodological soundness and replicability. For example, Strandberg et al. (2018), was submitted already in 2016, with exiting results, but new editorial and review standards required a demanding replication, which was conducted in 2017 with twice the number of participants. We fully support this development, as the scientific community at large benefits from more reliable results, but note that its has created longer and more demanding times to publication than was expected in the proposal. Also, in the final year the project had a very intense period, covering and collecting cross-cultural data from general elections held in Chile (nov 2017), Colombia (May 2018), Mexico (July 2018), and Sweden (September 2018), totalling over 6000 participants. Naturally, these results have not been fully analyzed and published yet.

THE THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH FRONT

1. For several reasons, our critics did not think CB would generalize outside Sweden, arguing that polarization and partisanship was far greater, and a far more infected issue in other countries, particularly in the US. To investigate this we first completed a CB paper survey on the personality characteristics of the US presidential candidates at the site of the first election debate in NY, capturing highly involved, knowledgeable and engaged participants. Despite this CB was very prevalent, and participants accepted altered party profiles in a fashion similar to our previous results from sweden. Then, In the final week before the US election we followed up the paper survey with a large scale online study, using both the personality characteristics and the critical political policy issues of the campaign. This study involved more than 1500 participants, split between presumptive Trump and Clinton voters in a way resembling the actual election outcome. Here, again, we found comparable levels of CB to our previous studies, providing strong evidence that the phenomenon is found even in the most polarized environments (Strandberg et al, submitted).

2. Another objection to CB was that Swedish politics supposedly is based on a particularly open and conciliatory mindset, and that we therefore ought to expect greater level of detection of our manipulations in other cultural contexts regardless of the stated level of polarization on the surveys. We investigated this is in a massive cross-cultural comparison during recent elections in Sweden and Mexico, Chile and Colombia. Despite the fact that the pressing issues of the elections, and the political dimensions and coalitions were very different (for example, in Mexico the election was won by Andrés Manuel López Obrado, a populist representing an unorthodox left-right coalition) we found that choice blindness was very prevalent in all cultural contexts.

3. We have also dispelled a very common critique of CB, in which it is assumed that the attitudes expressed in CB tasks are so shallow as to be more or less random. The way we have investigated this is to focus on the possibility of temporal persistence of the manipulated attitudes. The experiment used political statements, and we asked the participants to immediately verify the manipulated responses, and in the second, we also asked them to provide underlying arguments behind their attitudes. Only half of the manipulations were corrected by the participants. To measure lasting attitude change, we asked the participants to rate the same issues again later in the experiment, as well as one week after the first session. Participants in both conditions exhibited lasting shifts in attitudes, but the effect was considerably larger in the group that confabulated supporting arguments. This study contributes to the understanding of how confabulatory reasoning and self-perception processes can interact in lasting attitude change. It also highlights how political expressions can be both stable in the context of everyday life, yet flexible when argumentative processes are engaged.

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS THAT HAS BEEN GENERATED IN THE PROJECT
The most important novel line of inquiry this far has come from extending the proposed studies on awareness and knowledge effects. We were very intrigued by the possibility of not only investigating the influence of factual knowledge on CB, but also to use CB as an instrument to investigate factual knowledge and reasoning as such. Doing so, we have found that if you let participants solve relatively complex reasoning problems (either the Swedish SAT/Högskoleprovet, or logic problems like the Wason selection Task), and then present them with an altered answer as if it had been their own, they will often still find a way to “explain” how they reasoned to reach that conclusion. Thus, our CB procedure is able to ‘unmask’ knowledge available to the participants that were not expressed or registered by the test to begin with (Londos, Hall & Johansson, in prep). We have also done a series of experiments where participants produce arguments about reasoning problems, and evaluate other people’s arguments about the same problems, only sometimes they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else’s. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else’s argument, more than half rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Thus, the same arguments that participants deemed good enough to produce themselves, they did not deem good enough to accept when they thought it came from someone else. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people’s arguments than of their own, and they are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when the arguments are someone else’s than their own (Trouche et al, 2015, Trouche et al, 2018). From the time the project application was written to the current date, there has been a very constructive development in the behavioral sciences concerning methodological practices, open data, and reproducibility. In light of this development, we have also made our choice blindness software available under an open source framework, so that anyone can use and modify it freely. The software was produced in collaboration with researcher Andy Woods, and can be found here: https://github.com/andytwoods/Xperiment2/tree/master/experiments/choiceLund

THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS AND COLLABORATIONS OF THE PROJECT
The project has had a strong international dimension, with studies conducted in the US, UK, France, Mexico, Colombia and Chile. Main collaborators have been researcher Ryan McKay at Royal Holloway UK, who studies religious beliefs and implicit attitudes, Hugo Mercier at Laboratoire sur le Langage, Lyon, France, who is an expert on reasoning and decision biases, and Andrés Anibal Rieznik, a neuroscientist and magician at the Laboratorio de Neurociencia, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS TO AUDIENCES OUTSIDE THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY
We strongly believe in the value of public dissemination of research results. Some of the more notable instances during the course of the project includes: 

Swedish newspapers, such as Dagens Nyheter and Sydsvenska Dagbladet (https://www.dn.se/nyheter/vetenskap/psykologistudie-sa-latt-manipuleras-vi-till-kappvandare/, https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2018-09-03/forskaren-vara-asikter-ar-mer-flexibla-an-vi-tror

Popular science magazines, both in sweden and internationally (https://fof.se/tidning/2018/6/artikel/psykologiskt-trick-gor-ditt-ja-till-ett-nej, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-political-opinions-change/)

Swedish educational and edutainment television (https://urplay.se/program/203976-ur-samtiden-hjarndagen-2017-beslutsblindhet
https://www.lucs.lu.se/2016/11/celebrity-duo-filip-and-fredrik-takes-the-choice-blindness-labs-magic-moral-survey/)

International television documentaries (https://www.lucs.lu.se/2018/07/choice-blindness-in-science-of-magic-documentary/, https://video.nationalgeographic.com/tv/brain-games/00000144-1520-dcf1-a954-55f9b41c0000)

TED talk by collaborator Petter Johansson, which has been seen by over a million viewers.
(https://www.ted.com/talks/petter_johansson_do_you_really_know_why_you_do_what_you_do)

Our efforts have been succesful to the point of “beslutsblindhet” even being included in the list of noteworthy new terms in Sweden 2018 (http://www.sprakochfolkminnen.se/sprak/nyord/nyordslistan-2018.html)