After choosing, people remember the chosen option as better and the rejected one as worse than they judged them at the time.
Mather and Johnson found people misremember their own past ratings in the direction of the choice they made. It makes retrospective accounts of a decision unreliable evidence about the decision.
In practice
- Someone who agonised between two job offers remembers the rejected one as obviously worse within six months.
- A buyer who chose between two houses recalls the other as having problems that were not in their notes at the time.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors