(Un)healthy doubt
After more than 2000 kilometres and several stops, we have finally reached our goal: the heel of the boot, the east-most part of Italy. Astonishing! Now that we are here, I have instantly forgotten all those hours in the car under a burning sun. But on the way back, a little voice in my head nags: ‘You could have also just stopped in Tuscany! Now you have to drive all the way back as well!’ I quickly shake it off. It was amazing. I couldn’t have made a better choice.
It is an interesting trick our brain plays on us: as soon as we have taken a decision, we tend to remember its positive aspects better. In psychology, this phenomenon is referred to as the ‘choice-supportive bias’. In one of the first studies on this bias, participants were asked to choose between two candidates in an imaginary job interview procedure. Both applicants had four positive and four negative traits. However, when participants had to indicate afterwards which traits they still remembered, it turned out that they could recollect more positive characteristics of the chosen candidate (or even made ones up), and more negative traits of the rejected person. It seems that these differences already arise at the moment of the decision, but only get stronger over time. And what a follow-up study found was even more remarkable: when participants forgot their original choice, and were being told that they actually chose the rejected candidate, that suddenly became the one for which they had more positive memories.
These little ‘mistakes’ in our memory may seem quite problematic at first sight, but in reality they are quite useful. Imagine how tiring it would be if you would keep doubting all your decisions endlessly… Research in depressed individuals suggests that certain memory tricks function less well for them, which in some respects gives them a more realistic picture of reality. They miss the distorting, optimistic glasses through which most people subconsciously look at the world, with more rumination and feelings of regret as a consequence.
Nevertheless, these distorting glasses have disadvantages as well. By only remembering the positive aspects of our choices, sometimes we get quite stubbornly convinced of being right. Take my father, who is still driving the same model of car after twenty years. If you ask him, there is simply no better one. Salespeople are happy to take advantage of our selective memory. Notably, the bias goes even further: in subsequent research, participants could not even choose themselves, but were presented with only one option. They were told this option was selected especially for them, based on their personality. Guess what? They also had more positive memories of this prescribed option in the follow-up. So when washing machine salesmen can convince someone of the positive characteristics of the much more expensive model A, they run a relatively low risk that the customer will come back to trade it for the cheaper model B – by now, the buyer will be convinced that model A is simply the best.
So as useful as the choice-supportive bias may be, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to think deeply about why you made a certain decision – and to try something completely new from time to time, to prevent yourself from getting stuck in old beliefs and habits. For example, I had convinced myself for years that chocolate ice cream was the tastiest flavour. I didn’t order anything else, until one day, spontaneously, I chose a fruit sorbet and realised I much preferred that. And oh, how useful that discovery has been, during those weeks in Italy!
Annabel Nijhof 