Choice-Supportive Bias

Choice-supportive bias is the tendency to retroactively ascribe more positive attributes to an option one has chosen, and more negative attributes to options one rejected, than an objective assessment made at the time of the decision would support. Memory researchers have documented the pattern in studies asking people to recall the attributes of chosen and rejected options after a delay, consistently finding that recollections drift to make the chosen option appear to have been the clearly superior choice even when contemporaneous ratings showed the options were rated much more similarly. The bias is understood as a form of post-decisional memory distortion that helps people maintain confidence in past decisions and reduce cognitive dissonance about choices already made.