 In a normal population, Johansson and collaborators (Johansson et al. 2005; Johansson et al. 2006) manually displayed to participants pairs of pictures of women’s faces. On each trial, the participant was to point to the face he found more attractive. The picture of that face was then centered before the participant while the other face was hidden. On some trials, participants were asked to explain the reasons for their choices while continuing to look at the selected face. On a few key trials, the experimenters used sleight-of-hand to present to the participant the face that was not selected as though it had been the face selected. Strikingly, the switch was noticed only 28% of the time. What’s more, when the change was not detected participants actually gave explanations for their choice that appealed to specific features of the unselected face that were not possessed by the selected face 13% of the time. For example, one participant claimed to have chosen the face before him “because I love blondes” when in fact he had chosen a dark-haired face (Johansson et al. 2006, 690). Johansson and colleagues failed to find any systematic differences in the explanations of choice between the manipulated and non-manipulated trials, using a wide variety of measures. They found, for example, no difference in linguistic markers of confidence (including pauses in speech), emotionality, specificity of detail, complexity or length of description, or general position in semantic space. These results, like Nisbett’s and Wilson’s, suggest that at least some of the time when people think they are explaining the bases of their decisions, they are instead merely theorizing or confabulating.