People are often creatures of habit
in the choices they make. A brand of
toothpaste that you start to buy as a college student can easily become the
brand you purchase most often for the rest of your adult life.
There are lots of reasons why you
might stick with a particular brand for a long time. For one thing, your early experience with a
product might help you decide that you really like it, which can lead you to
keep buying it in the future. For
another, in many situations, the actual differences in performance between
brands are small, and so it probably does not matter a lot what you
choose. In that case, you may as well
minimize the amount of effort you spend making a choice, and so buy what you
bought last time.
There is also some evidence that
the act of making a choice can influence your preferences. Studies suggest that when you choose one item
over another, the act of making a choice enhances your preference for the thing
you choose and causes you to devalue the thing you reject.
Of course, most studies that have
explored this question have looked only at short-term changes in people’s
preferences. Most psychology studies
take about an hour, and so the studies usually look just at changes in what
people like over the course of that hour-long period.
An interesting study by Tali
Sharot, Stephen Fleming, Xiaoyu Yu, Raphael Koster, and Raymond Dolan in the
October, 2012 issue of Psychological
Science looked at the effect of making a choice on people’s preferences
3-years later.
In their study, participants came
to the lab and rated how interested they were in going to a variety of vacation
destinations. Those ratings provided a
baseline. One group of participants then made choices
among pairs of vacation destinations.
The choices were set up so that some were easy choices where one
vacation spot was already strongly preferred to the other. The rest of the choices were set up to be
difficult—the two destinations were equally preferred at the start of the
study. A second group saw similar pairs
of vacation destinations, but the computer chose vacation spots for them. Next, participants rated how much they liked
each vacation destination again as a short-term measure of how choices affected
preferences.
Some of the participants were
contacted about three years later and were shown the same set of vacation
destinations. Once again, they rated
their preferences.
What happened?
The strongest finding in these
studies came from the condition in which people made hard choices between
destinations they liked equally. Soon
after making this choice, they gave a higher preference rating to the
destination they chose compared to the destination they rejected. Three years later, people’s preferences for
destinations they chose persisted. They
still preferred the destination they chose to the one they rejected. People who had the computer select a
destination for them showed no reliable change in preference either immediately
or after a three-year delay.
When the choice was easy for people
to make, a different pattern emerged.
When people made easy choices, it had no effect on their preferences
right away. Three years later, people’s
preference for items they chose actually went down compared to the items they
rejected.
What is going on here?
A choice is difficult when you have
to select from among a set of options that you like about equally well. These difficult choices require attention and
effort. You may also feel a little
uncomfortable making these choices.
After you make the choice, the same mechanisms that are involved in
cognitive dissonance will work to make your choice feel consistent with your
beliefs. So, when you make a difficult
choice, you will bump up your preference for the thing you selected and you
will push down your preference for the thing you rejected.
The fascinating thing about this
effect, though, is that it can still be seen years later. That means that choices you make today may be
with you for years to come.