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dissonance
You adjust your identity to match your recent decisions.
After making a difficult choice, you will inflate the value of your chosen option and devalue the rejected one.
This internal adjustment minimizes the discomfort of knowing you could have chosen differently. By convincing yourself that your choice was clearly superior, you protect your ego from potential regret. You effectively rewrite your preference to align with your past actions.
You are not choosing what you like; you are learning to like what you chose.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Brehm, 1956, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
- What the check found
- Brehm (1956) is the seminal paper on the free-choice paradigm. While the provided text does not contain a quote, the phenomenon is a well-established psychological principle.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.