Every time we approach a new election cycle, a similar pattern emerges. In the
Presidential election, for example, most voters already have a pretty clear preference. However, there are always at least 10 percent
of voters (and sometimes even more) who classify themselves as
“undecided.”
Even people who are officially
“undecided” may have some leaning toward one candidate or another. Quite a bit of research suggests that the way
that someone is leaning influences the way they interpret new information. If you have a slight preference for one
candidate, then you are likely to give more weight to the positive things you
hear about that candidate and the negative things you hear about the other
candidate. In that way, you slowly start
to confirm your initial impression.
The idea behind this effect is
that we like to keep our beliefs consistent.
That means that we tend to focus on information that supports what we
already like and to pay less attention to information that might call our
existing beliefs into question. This
mechanism is also behind “cognitive dissonance” effects where people begin with
a set of beliefs that are not consistent with each other and gradually change
some of the beliefs until they fit together.
An interesting set of studies
in the August, 2012 issue of Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes by Evan Polman and Jay Russo examined
some seemingly small factors that can have a big impact on this kind of
spreading coherence.
In their studies, they had
people express a preference for two restaurants. The descriptions were designed so that if you
saw all of the features of the restaurants at the same time, you would think
they were quite similar and would have a hard time choosing between them. This was done by having four features that
were about equally good for each restaurant and then one feature that strongly
favored each restaurant.
The first feature people saw
favored one restaurant over the other.
One group was asked to circle which restaurant they thought was better
at this point. Naturally, people tended
to recognize that the restaurant with the better feature was currently the
better option. After that, people saw additional
features. After each one, people rated
how much that new feature favored one of the restaurants over the other. They also rated how strongly they preferred
one restaurant to the other up to that point.
Consistent with previous work,
by the end of the study, 61% of people preferred the restaurant that had the
best first feature. In addition,
overall, their ratings of the other features favored the restaurant that they
preferred at the start of the study.
But, that isn’t the
interesting part.
Another group of participants expressed
their initial preference in a slightly different way. Rather than circling the option they liked
best, they had to use a pencil to completely darken a box to express their
preference. This process took about 10
seconds. This extra effort increased
people’s initial commitment to one of the options. For this group 75% of people preferred the option
they liked initially at the end of the study.
Their ratings of the other features favored the restaurant they
preferred initially even more strongly than those of the people who just
circled their preference at the start.
Why would having to darken a
box increase people’s commitment to an option?
You might think that having to
spend about 10 seconds filling in a box would give people more time to think
about the first feature. However, in
another study in this series, asking people to think more carefully about the
first feature did not strengthen the effect of the initial preference as much
as filling in a box.
Instead, it seems to come from
the way people interpret the amount of effort they put into expressing this
initial preference. Filling in this box
take a lot of effort. People seem to
attribute that effort to their commitment to the option.
The researchers explored this
possibility in a third study. In this
study, one group is told that filling in a box is an easy way to express their
preference for one of the options. This
group should be surprised that it takes so long to do it. A second group is told that filling in a box
is a difficult way to express their preference.
This group should not be at all surprised that it takes a while to fill
in the box.
In this study, the people who
think that filling in the box should be easy show a much stronger effect of
their initial impression than the people who think that filling in the box
should be difficult.
What does this all mean?
Our tendency to keep our
beliefs consistent has an impact on the way we make choices. Over time, our initial beliefs affect the way
we interpret new information so that those first impressions get stronger over
time. Seemingly simple factors like the
way that we express an initial preference can heighten this effect.
Perhaps the scariest part of
these findings is that they typically happen without our awareness. That is, we think we are evaluating each new
feature objectively when we see it. We
do not usually realize how much our existing preferences are affecting the way
we interpret new information. As a
result, we think we have built up our eventual preference by evaluating lots of
evidence independently, when in reality we have been influenced by our existing
beliefs.
