MIRA (Measurement through Interaction, Revision, and Analysis): A Field Protocol for Belief Updating and Decision Revision Through Physical Behavioral Elicitation

Understanding how people update beliefs and revise decisions when verified information conflicts with prior perceptions is a central problem in behavioral economics, public policy, and human–data interaction. We introduce MIRA, a low-cost field protocol for physical behavioral elicitation that combines resource-constrained choice, verified information, observed decision revision, and open-ended explanation. MIRA records an initial behavioral choice, exposes participants to a verified data point, and observes whether and how their subsequent decision changes. The protocol distinguishes three analytically separate constructs — belief, stated priority, and observed choice — and proposes two candidate measures, Cognitive Delta and the Perceptual Correction Index (PCI), whose measurement validity remains to be established. We report a pilot consisting of five field deployments with 76 participants across three Colombian cities. The pilot demonstrates the operational feasibility of the protocol in informal market settings, reveals substantial contextual heterogeneity in observed substitution patterns, and documents a systematic divergence in one deployment between participants’ reported price perceptions and official price data. These findings are presented as exploratory evidence and hypothesis generation rather than causal or population-level inference. MIRA contributes a field-oriented approach to studying belief updating and decision revision through data physicalization and embodied interaction, together with a validation agenda for behavioral research, public policy, and future applications in decentralized decision-making.