PsychologicalDUAL-USE

Choice-Supportive Bias

What it is

After making a choice, people remember the option they picked as having had more good features, and the option they rejected as having had more bad ones, than either actually had — memory is rewritten to flatter the decision.

How it works

Mara Mather, Eldar Shafir and Marcia Johnson showed in 2000 that when people chose between two options with mixed features and were later asked which option had which feature, they systematically assigned positive features to the chosen option and negative features to the rejected one, including features that had never been presented at all. Mather and Johnson found the same year that older adults showed the distortion more strongly than younger ones. The mechanism is source monitoring under a motive: at retrieval the mind reconstructs the options from fragments, and “I chose it, so it must have been better” is one of the cues used to fill the gaps. This is distinct from Brehm's 1956 post-decision “spreading of alternatives,” which Chen and Risen showed in 2010 can be partly a statistical artefact of the free-choice paradigm; the memory distortion itself has held up. The persuasion consequence is that a decision, once obtained, defends itself. Sellers, parties and partners who secure a choice can rely on the chooser's own memory to make the rejected alternative look worse over time, which suppresses returns, defections and second thoughts without any further effort.

Real-world examples

  • •In Mather, Shafir and Johnson's 2000 experiments, participants who chose between two job candidates or two apartments later attributed more of the good features, including invented ones, to the option they had picked.
  • •Post-purchase “you made a great choice” emails and onboarding sequences from car dealers, software vendors and universities arrive in the window when the buyer's memory of the alternatives is being rewritten in the product's favour.
  • •Studies of presidential elections have found that voters rate their chosen candidate more favourably after the vote than before it, a post-decision shift that makes post-election surveys a poor guide to what people believed when they cast the ballot.
  • •Consumers who have chosen a subscription or a phone plan misremember the rejected plan as having lacked features it actually offered, so that switching later seems pointless even when the rejected plan was better.
  • •In hiring and in relationships, people who argued for a candidate or a partner recall the runner-up's weaknesses in more detail than their strengths, and offer the rewritten comparison as evidence that the original judgment was sound.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Reminding a customer of the real reasons they chose you, with the alternatives still available for inspection, is honest reassurance; relying on their rewritten memory to make a rejected option look worse than it was, so that returns, switches or reconsideration never happen, is exploitation of the distortion.

  • ●Post-decision reassurance is legitimate when it is true; do not send “you chose well” messages about a product you know is worse than the alternative the customer rejected.
  • ●Keep the customer's or voter's comparison record available — the spec sheet, the platform, the quote — rather than relying on their memory of it fading in your favour.
  • ●Do not use a person's distorted memory of their own choice to argue them out of a return, a refund, or a reconsideration they are entitled to.

How to defend against it

  • ►Write down the reasons for and against each option at the moment you decide, and consult that record rather than your memory when you later ask whether you chose well.
  • ►When you find yourself certain the rejected option was worse, check the original comparison — the saved listing, the earlier quote, the other candidate's file — before acting on the certainty.
  • ►Treat post-purchase congratulations and “welcome” sequences as marketing aimed at your memory, not as information; they arrive precisely when second thoughts would otherwise form.
  • ►Set a review date when you make a large choice and re-evaluate against your original criteria on that date, not against the story you now tell about the decision.

References

  1. Mather, M., Shafir, E., & Johnson, M. K. (2000). Misremembrance of options past: Source monitoring and choice. Psychological Science, 11(2), 132-138
    The founding experiments: positive features misattributed to chosen options and negative features to rejected ones, including features never presented.
  2. Mather, M., & Johnson, M. K. (2000). Choice-supportive source monitoring: Do our decisions seem better to us as we age?. Psychology and Aging, 15(4), 596-606
    Older adults show the choice-supportive memory distortion more strongly than younger adults.
  3. Brehm, J. W. (1956). Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52(3), 384-389
    The original post-decision spreading-of-alternatives finding from which choice-supportive memory is distinguished.
  4. Chen, M. K., & Risen, J. L. (2010). How choice affects and reflects preferences: Revisiting the free-choice paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(4), 573-594
    The critique showing that spreading of alternatives in the free-choice paradigm can arise as a statistical artefact.
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