English language and linguistics research seminar: Alexandra Mouratidou, Lund University: Non-verbal Signs of Choice Awareness

Have you ever swiped right on a dating app, only to meet someone who doesn’t quite match the profile you chose – yet you go along with it and even justify that this was your preference all along? This scenario illustrates what is often described as “choice blindness” (Johansson et al., 2005). I propose instead the term “manipulation blindness” (Mouratidou, 2020) as a more adequate description and investigate how awareness of choice manifests across different levels of consciousness and within diverse semiotic systems. Using a cognitive-semiotic framework, I combine experimental studies with phenomenological philosophy to examine both verbal and non-verbal expressions of choice justification. I will present evidence of participants’ bodily manifestations of choice awareness that often contradict their verbal reports. In one study (Mouratidou et al. 2024), participants chose the most attractive of two faces and justified their choices – unaware that on some trials, they were asked to justify a choice they had not made. Verbal responses were categorized as (i) nonmanipulated, (ii) manipulated-detected, and (iii) manipulated-undetected trials. Meanwhile, bodily expressions were analyzed across five Categories of Bodily Expression (CBE): Adaptors, Torso, Head, Face, and Hand movements, revealing systematic differences in duration, frequency, and variety across trial types. In a subsequent study (Mouratidou & Andrén, under review), participants’ deictic gestures toward preferred and non-preferred pictures were analyzed across seven dimensions: Deixis, Indicated Object, Hand Shape, Use of Hand, Tactility, Utterance, and Valence. We found consistent gestural differences between preferred and non-preferred options. Strikingly, in verbally undetected manipulated trials, participants gesturally indicated their preferred option, which was presented as their rejected alternative, in a manner similar to how they indicated the preferred picture card when there was no manipulation. These findings support a polysemiotic approach to the analysis of choice making, showing that awareness extends beyond verbal reports, and a broadened notion of conscious awareness that integrates both explicit and implicit dimensions of how choices are made, experienced, and communicated.