What just happened, properly explained

Up to twice — fewer if you weighed your choices slowly, or caught it — you were shown a choice you had rejected and told it was the one you picked. If you justified it, you did what nearly everyone does. In 2005, researchers in Lund showed people pairs of faces, asked them to pick the more attractive one, and then — by sleight of hand — handed some of them the other photograph and asked why they chose it. Most swaps went unnoticed, and people gave fluent, sincere, detailed reasons for choices they never made. The phenomenon is called choice blindness, and the explanations it produces are called confabulation. They are not lies. That is what makes them worth meeting in person.

The pre-ticked box was the second room. Almost nobody changes a default, which is why the same organ-donation question, asked with the box ticked the other way, splits neighbouring countries by nearly ninety percentage points. Defaults are decisions someone else made, wearing your signature.

The predictions were the third. They used nothing but what you did inside this page — tap timing, tap side, reading pace. No permissions, no data from anywhere else. The few minutes you spent here were enough for three honest wagers. Everything else in your pocket has had years, and it wagers constantly. Research on everyday habits suggests roughly forty percent of what we do each day happens without a decision at all.

The deception, in full

Up to two of the five choices you were asked to justify were swapped: the option you rejected was presented as the one you chose. Fewer, if your choices were considered too slowly to be swapped honestly, or if you caught them — a caught swap was replaced with a genuine item. The threshold warned that parts of the experience would not be what they seemed; the reveal showed you your real choices, accurately, within the same act. The settings screen with the pre-ticked caption box was arranged for the later reveal; the box did nothing. The prediction cards were written before the two test screens, from your in-room behaviour only, and scored honestly — misses included. Nothing else was staged.

What was kept: how many people complete each act, whether swaps are caught or missed, whether the week experiment left the room (a bare event, nothing attached), and the anonymous distribution of worth-numbers, zeros included. No account exists, no identity was recorded in the room, and the sentences you wrote were shown back to you once and never stored — they died with your tab. Your browser keeps a single mark that you have been here, so the room can be honest with you if you return; it stays on your device and says nothing else.

If you paid, the payment itself is the one place anonymity ends: our payment processor records what card paid what amount, as with any purchase. We never join it to anything in the room — and worth-numbers are stored by day, not by time, so they cannot be matched to a payment.

The research

If something surfaced in what you wrote that needs a person, take it to a person. This was a mirror, not a counsellor, and it kept nothing you told it.

Questions, objections, corrections: hello@immanence.inc. Sien is made by Immanence.