Lecture 2: Choices and consequences

Psychology 458/558
Judgment and Decision Making
Prof. Bertram Malle
Fall 1995

Lecture 2: Oct 3
Choices and consequences

1. Decisions as crossing points in time

Decisions can be described as changing an ongoing state or process into a new state or process. For example, you are at the movies with an old friend; you've never done it before, but you now decide to hold your friend's hand. At points of decisions you interrupt the automatic flow of past into future, you take control. Every decision creates a new future, a set of (virtually infinite) consequences. But more importantly, decisions represent or anticipate the future they are trying to create. The awareness of decisions as both anticipating and creating future can provide power over and insight into future.

2. What makes decisions difficult?

The key feature of decisions, that they try to anticipate and create future, is at the same time one of its major difficulties: We can never fully represent all possible future consequences of our choices; and even if we could, we wouldn't know which possible consequences will become actual consequences. This features of decisions is typically called uncertainty (about consequences for self and others, short- and long-term).

Another source of difficulty in decisions is called conflict. It refers to the fact that every choice implies at least two options, each of which has positive and negative consequences. When choosing one option, you get its positive consequences and avoid the rejected option's negative consequences; but at the same time you must accept the chosen options negative consequences and miss out on the rejected options positive consequences. This is the major source of dissonance in decisions (see below).

A last source of difficulty is the impact of a decision. Even if you have little uncertainty and little conflict, decision with major (and irrevocable) consequences are difficult (e.g., assisted suicide).

3. Dissonance before and after a choice

When no option is significantly more attractive than the other options, you are in a situation of conflict. (Note that conflict exists both when the options are equally unattractive and when they are equally attractive.) Whatever option you choose, you will have to accept some negative features or consequences of the chosen option and forego some positive features/consequences of the unchosen option. These implications are dissonant with your ideal of selecting good things and avoiding bad things. The feelings of dissonance accompany your decision and are felt even after you decide as well.

4. Dissonance reduction

According to Festinger (1954), people will attempt to reduce their dissonance after they have made a difficult decision. Usually, they do one or all of the following:

Selective exposure: People primarily attend to the positive features of the chosen option and forget about the other option (e.g., after buying a SATURN, you see all the SATURNS on the road and in the magazine ads...)

Rationalization: After having chosen under high dissonance, people often come up with numerous food reasons why they chose the way they did (even if the reasons come to mind quite a bit after the decision). This rationalization is demonstrated in famous dissonance studies such as Festinger & Carlsmith (1959).

Commitment: People are often more confident about the quality of their choice immediately after they made it than immediately before (e.g., the chosen alternative increases in attractiveness after the decision, Brehm, 1956). The chosen option becomes part of the self, and people work hard against giving it up. Commitment therefore facilitates the sunk-cost bias (people's reluctance to give up a course of action they have invested in, even when facing very good reasons to do so).

Defensiveness: The more dissonance people experience, the more they are sensitive to challenges to the reasonableness of their decision. Asking people directly why they decided a certain way is a safe way to increase their rationalization (and thus help them in their dissonance reduction); people who react defensively to such a question are likely to have experienced quite a bit of dissonance but were able to reduce it through strong commitment.

5. Regret

Regret is a special form of dissonance in which you wish (or wistfully imagine) you would have chosen otherwise. Research shows that regret is strong as long as the consequences of the decision are unclear or can still be undone (e.g., ordering food as the first one in a group gives you a chance to experience regret while the others are still ordering). Once the consequences are clear, however, dissonance reduction begins and helps you reduce regret. If you want to avoid regret, you should make firm and consequential decisions.

Research by Gilovich and colleagues also shows that short-term regret is stronger for actions (e.g., you buy a new car) than for inactions (you decided to stick to your old one), but long-term regret is stronger for inactions (e.g., that person you never asked out...) than for actions (e.g., that person you did ask out...). Why? Short-term regret leads to dissonance reduction, making you commit to actions, thus avoiding long-term regret. Inactions, however, do not produce short-term regret, hence skip the phase of dissonance reduction and are therefore more vulnerable to long-term regret.

Anticipating dissonance and regret as reasons for choosing. Understanding the discussed processes allows you to make more conscious decisions: Trusting in your ability to reduce dissonance, you may decide on actions that you would otherwise avoid because of fear of regret. If you are not good at reducing dissonance, however, you may want to avoid regret by making more conservative decisions.

The idea that people incorporate their own "post-decision reactions" into the decision itself, can be applied to several vignettes in the assigned paper by Shafir, Simonson, & Tversky (1993).