You decided to buy a new smartphone, chose two suitable ones, but you doubt which one to prefer. After evaluating all the pros and cons, you finally choose one of them and buy it.
Now you like him much more than half an hour ago, when you looked at both options with doubt. And in the future, you may begin to prefer the same brand, even if another one offers the best product in terms of characteristics for the same money.
This is to blame for the distortion of the choice made — a psychological effect that was discovered more than 60 years ago. And since then, its existence has been repeatedly confirmed.
For the first time, the distortion of the choice made was observed J. W. Brehm. Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives / The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in an experiment with household appliances. The students were asked to evaluate different models, and then choose one of the devices as a gift. After 20 minutes, they were again asked to evaluate all the equipment. And this time, the devices they chose as a gift received more flattering characteristics than at the beginning of the test.
The author of the experiment, Professor Jack Brem, suggested that this is due to cognitive dissonance. After choosing a person, doubts overcome , because the chosen thing also has advantages, and the rejected one has advantages. He is experiencing psychological discomfort, afraid that he chose the wrong thing. To get rid of unpleasant sensations, a person is looking for confirmation that he did everything right. And, of course, finds it.
And the more J. W. Brehm. Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives / The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology the similarities between the proposed options, the stronger the dissonance and the more a person likes his choice.
The distortion of the choice made was observed in a variety of experiments R. E. Knox, J. A. Inkster. Postdecision dissonance at post time / Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . There was even an experiment with people suffering from amnesia. They didn't remember the first part of the experiment, but they still rated the thing they had already chosen in the past better than the others. The choice was offered to children and even rhesus monkeys, and the same thing was observed everywhere.
The participants always preferred what they chose for the first time. This works even in the absence of a real benefit and changes the brain's response to choices and alternatives.
In one study T. Sharot, B. De Martino, R. J. Dolan. How choice reveals and shapes expected hedonic outcome / The Journal of Neuroscience: The official journal of the Society for Neuroscience the participants were asked to choose where they want to go on vacation, and the brain activity was monitored at the time of making a decision and after it using MRI. At the same time, the choice was purely hypothetical: the participants were not going to be given a ticket, and they knew about it.
It turned out that after the choice, people's reaction to the location changed. When they imagined a vacation in the chosen place, the activity of the caudate nucleus increased. This is an area of the brain that is activated when a person imagines something good in the future. The rejected location did not cause such a response.
There is nothing wrong with liking your choice. It's even good: you are not tormented by doubts and regrets.
The problem arises at the moment when you refuse to admit that your choice may be worse in some ways.
This is dedication to a brand that has stopped producing decent products, getting stuck in a destructive relationship, working in a specialty that was originally chosen incorrectly.
Just recognize the fact that the rejected thing, specialty, relationship, also has its advantages, and the ones you have chosen have disadvantages. This will help you to give up the belief that "your own is a priori better than someone else's" and not hold on to something that requires changes.
Lifehacker has a book about how our own brain deceives us. In it, relying on science, we analyze a variety of cognitive distortions one by one and tell how not to fall into the traps of thinking.
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