Choice-Supportive Bias

What is Choice-Supportive Bias?

Choice-supportive bias is misremembering information in a way that favors a chosen option or disfavors a rejected option. After choosing between two products, for example, a person might later assign a good feature to the one they bought even though it belonged to the alternative.

Forms and Evidence

Lind and colleagues’ 2017 review distinguishes

• misattributing features to the wrong option,
• distorting facts,
• remembering information that was never presented,
• and selectively forgetting information.

The strongest evidence concerned feature misattribution on recognition tests. Evidence for the other forms and other tests was weaker. The review therefore gives a stronger basis for some forms of choice-supportive memory than others.

Explanation and Implications

Motivational and cognitive accounts have been proposed, but the effect does not demonstrate a universal need to protect self-esteem or a memory-decay process that necessarily favors chosen options.

Distorted recollections could affect later decisions. A record made at the time of the decision gives you something to compare with your recollection. That is a practical check, not a proven cure.

Outcome bias instead judges the quality of a decision by how it turned out.