Choice-supportive bias

Tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were
Choice supportive bias or post purchase rationalization is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected and/or to demote the forgone options. It is part of cognitive science, and is a distinct cognitive bias that occurs once a decision is made. For example, if a person chooses option A instead of option B, they are likely to ignore or downplay the faults of option A while amplifying or ascribing new negative faults to option B. Conversely, they are also likely to notice and amplify the advantages of option A and not notice or de emphasize those of option B. What is remembered about a decision can be as important as the decision itself, especially in determining how much regret or satisfaction one experiences. It is also possible that choice supportive memories arise because an individual is only paying attention to certain pieces of information when making a decision or to post choice cognitive dissonance. It results in a type of choice supportive bias when information is attributed to the wrong source. An example of fact distortion would be if you have to choose between buying one out of two cars which can both drive at a maximum speed of 130 mph, the foregone car would be remembered with a maximum speed of 100 mph, whereas the chosen car will be remembered with a maximum speed of 160 mph. Consequently, the facts concerning both cars have been distorted. There are varieties of fact distortion that remain contested throughout the literature; as a result, there is no consensus on how it works. Some authors argue that the distortion mainly occurs when the favoured option is misremembered more preferentially, whereas other researchers argue that memory distortion does not occur or is only likely to take place during the post decision stage. Overall, some studies have argued that holding the belief that distortion cannot take place (as soon as the decision is made) means that facts cannot be distorted.

Alignability in the context of choice supportive bias refers to whether both options have directly comparable features. For example, an alignable characteristic could be whether both options can be measured in centimetres. In the context of decision making, alignability can influence choices or the ability to make a similarity judgement of a potential option. The alignment process enables a person to draw similarities and difference which impact their choice supportive biases. Research to support this can be displayed by the following example: when given a choice between two brands of popcorn, participants were more likely to choose the one with the superior alignable differences, such as “pops in its own bag” compared with “requires a microwaveable bowl” than the one with superior non alignable differences, such as “not likely to burn” compared with those containing “some citric acid"

The extent of the delay between encoding is a potential factor that could affect choice supportive bias. If there is a larger delay between encoding (i. e. viewing the information about the options) and retrieval (i. e. memory tests) it is likely to result in more biased choices rather than the impact of the actual choice on choice supportive bias.