The Toaster Not Taken

or even earlier. But it's an interesting poem because I think it usually gets interpreted to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means. All right, so this is the road not taken by Robert Frost. Are you ready to hear it again? Yeah? Yeah. This is always a pleasure to to hear or to read, even though it's one that I think we're all hit with le probably

at the elementary school level. You know. I feel like I came to a greater appreciation of just the music of Robert Frost's poems as an adult than than I had for them when I was in school. So I'm not sure exactly what changed there. Maybe I became grumpier and he was quite a grump himself. But but here we go. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler.

Long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took the other, as just as fair and having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted, where though as for that, the passing there had warned them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day, yet, knowing how way leads onto way, I doubted if I should ever come back,

I shall be telling this with a sigh. Somewhere ages and ages. Hence, two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. It's a beautiful bomb, it really is. But one of the things that that is really funny is that I think people usually interpret this poem as a sort of celebration of unique individuality and

a celebration of going your own way. It's it's about how if you go boldly where others have not gone before, if you remain your unique, authentic self and choose the stranger path, you'll be rewarded with a life of unique meaning. But if you read it closely, I think the poem is meant to be a quite ironic sort of perry against exactly that way of thinking, because what happens in it, well,

the speaker comes to a fork in the road. The speaker evaluates the for each path for a bit, at first thinks one is more traveled than the other, but then ultimately realize is that they're about the same. Then takes one road rather than the other for no major reason, they are in reality pretty much indistinguishable. Then thinks about how later in life he'll be claiming that he took the bold, untraveled path and that it changed his life,

even though that wasn't true. Yeah, I feel like that's something that a lot of people miss out on in the poem, and I think a lot of it sometimes comes down to um the discussions about what is he actually talking about, And people get very wrapped up in that, like what was the choice? No, no, no, not the

walk in the woods? What were you actually talking about? Frost, And then you you kind of end up ignoring the mechanics of it that you're talking about here, Well, yeah, because I think this is in a way a sort of an image poem that can be applied to many different types of choices one makes in life. Though I think it was literally inspired by him walking in the woods in New England. I'm not positive about that, but

I think I've read that before. But yeah, So it's essentially a poem about a person who show was at random between two at the time pretty much indistinguishable options, and then comes up later with an ex post facto justification for his choice that it was the one made you made out of daring an authentic principle, and that it was deeply meaningful. And I really like this ironic interpretation because it raises a number of really interesting questions

about human nature. So, first of all, isn't so much of life like this. We do make life changing decisions without knowing what the outcome will be. That the options in front of us might look indistinguishable. At the time you choose between two job opportunities, you can't really tell

that one is necessarily better than the other. But then later you you will have had much of your life developed on the basis of whichever choice you made, and you have to come up with a narrative of your life story that makes sense of that choice in light of its later unpredictable significance. And I've viously, when you do this a lot of times you're gonna end up remembering the choice differently than it was in your mind when you made it. But then it also raises an

interesting question about decision making. In the moment. When there are two options that are pretty much the same, we we often have to form a preference for one or the other. Now, there are plenty of cases where you can quite clearly see why you'd prefer one option over another. But in cases where that's not true, in the absence of the obvious superiority of one option over another, where do our preferences arise from? Why do we decide we like the left path rather than the right path if

they look about the same. And for the purpose of today's episode, I want to expand beyond thinking about paths in the woods or big life decisions when it comes to the formation of any preferences, even extremely minor ones. You know you choose between two basically equivalent brands of blender at the store, why do we like the things that we like, Why do we have the preferences that we have. I'm probably gonna refer back to the Black Mirrorum episode the Black Mirror movie Band or Snatch a

lot in this one. We did an episode about it last year, breaking down, you know, the nature of choice and free will and all. But like I instantly think about the early stages of Band or Snatch, where as you do this choose your own adventure media, you have to choose which cereal the main character is going to have for breakfast, and you know, ultimately it doesn't really matter in the context of that of that story. Uh, And it's it's more about just teaching the mechanics of

choice within this um you know, computer narrative. But but it's interesting that you still have to exert a certain amount of mental energy to make that choice, to decide this serial over that one. And it's interesting how and this will tie into something we'll talk about in just a minute here. It's interesting how, at least for me, those early choices are kind of uncomfortable when you have to pick the cereal or you have to pick the record or some thing, and you don't have a natural

strong preference one way or another. You've got this kind of weird anxiety that lingers after your choice, like, I don't know, did I pick the right one? Yeah, because later on you can definitely make a call like Okay, this is the more dramatic choice, or well, this is the more this is the moral choice. But in choosing the two cereals, aside from maybe health concerns about the sugary cereal versus the other cereal, there's not as much

to go on, right. So one of the main things I want to talk about in this episode today it is a really interesting fact that's been observed in a bunch of psychology studies over the years, and I'm gonna look at an early one from the nineteen fifties in just a minute. Here. We often assume that our preferences are what determine our choices. I pick this option instead of that because I like it better. But there is also significant evidence here's your AUNTI Metaboli, that our choices

determine our preferences. I like this option because I picked it. Uh. And of the big early studies here, a classic study that was in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in nineteen fifty six by Jack W. Brim is called post decision changes in the desirability of alternatives. So so again, this is by the American psychologist Jack W. Brim. Brim had been a student of the highly influential American social psychologist Leon Festinger, who is probably best known for developing

the theory of cognitive dissonance. Now, this is a term you've probably all heard before, but a lot of people don't know the experimental history surrounding it. So the simple version is that cognitive dissonance is the state of holding contradictory beliefs or values, or contradictions between your beliefs and your values and your actions, observing these contradictions within yourself simultaneously.

So one example that's very often sided is knowing that smoking cigarettes is harmful to your health, but smoking them anyway. But there there can be all kinds of cognitive dissonance. Our life is just full of of of cognitive dissonance. You know, you believe that your spouse is a good person, but you also know that they did something wrong. You know that they stole money out of the church collection

plate or something. I think one that's probably very common appearances you love your child, but you really honestly don't like something they did. You know, you hate the way their crayon drawings look or something. Uh. And and when you're faced with this kind of contradiction, and of course we're faced with these kind of contradictions all the time, Uh,

there is a problem that arises. What Festinger argued was that the state of cognitive dissonance is experienced internally as a profound stress, and people will do almost anything to alleviate that stress. And so this this remedial action to to alleviate the stress can take many forms, but it's just some finding some way to resolve the contradiction. Really, anything that reduces the internal perception of a contradiction between

beliefs and values and actions. So if you're going back to the classic example of a person who smokes cigarettes but who is aware of the dangers of tobacco, they have options including they could they could change their actions so you can actually quit smoking. But of course that one's really hard, so a lot of people would instead go for one of the other options, which is change explicit beliefs. You can say, uh, yeah, what are these doctors know? You know, doctors are wrong about stuff all

the time. I don't know, nobody ever really proved that smoking causes cancer. That's you know, the these studies are Can you really trust these studies? And on and on?

You can you can just say no, I don't believe that the risks are real, or you could change other types of beliefs, such as changing underlying beliefs that are going unspoken, because if there's an internal conflict, if there's cognitive dissonance arising over smoking, it relies on the unspoken premise that you want to live as long and be as healthy as possible. So you could relieve cognitive dissonance

by explicitly rejecting that belief. And you've probably heard this before from people who say like, yeah, I smoke, Yeah it causes cancer, but hey, who wants to live forever. That's also you know, a great example of of short

term versus long term thinking, right exactly. I mean, I think there are ways of looking at things like I mean, on one hand, like you know, people are free to to make the decisions about their own health as they choose, But I think there is a legitimate school of thought that would say that, uh, making statements like that is basically a lack of compassion for your own future self. Yeah,

but statements like that can help resolve the dissonance. Uh, there there are other things people do to People can think of compensatory reasons that they would keep smoking. So they might say, Okay, I I accept the fact that smoking is bad for health. I keep doing it, but I've got some like compensatory justification in my brain. I need to smoke in order to stay focused at work, or like I need to smoke in order to stay thin,

or things like that. And so people have argued about how best to interpret cognitive dissonance theory, and and they've argued around the margins over the years. But it seems to me like cognitive dissonance is is pretty robust and a very lasting concept from from social psychology that explains a lot of our behaviors and cognitive processes. There have been a ton of different experiments that seem to support the idea of cognitive dissonance reduction is a major pressure

driving our beliefs and behaviors. Just one I was reading about as a study by Festinger and Carl Smith from nineteen fifty nine that works something like this. So you have people perform something that they believe to be the actual bulk of the experiment. It's this like long, repetitive, extremely boring task. I don't remember exactly what it is.

Is like, you know, you put these pegs in holes for an hour or something is mind numbingly boring, and then you pay the subjects after they're done with the experiment to tell the people who are going in to do it next that it's really fun and interesting. Uh so they're gonna be lying. They're gonna be openly saying

something that they know not to be true. And Festinger and Carl Smith found something interesting, which is that if you pay people a larger sum of money to tell this lie, they will they will afterwards acknowledge it as a lie. So, you know, you give me a hundred bucks or whatever. I think it was twenty dollars in the study, but that was nine fifties money. You give me a hundred bucks or something. I say like, yeah, you know, I I lied to the next guy. I

told him it was going to be really fun. If you pay somebody a pittance sum to tell the lie, you give them just a dollar, they are more likely afterwards to report believing that what they said was true. So you give somebody a hundred dollars to say this is really putting the pegs in the holes is really one? They say, yeah, I was lying, but hey, I gotta pay day. You pay people a dollar to say it, and they say, actually putting the pegs in the holes

was pretty fun. And the reasoning here is that in the absence of a large sum of money to internally justify the lie in order to basically relieve the cognitive dissonance, give you a reason in your mind for having said it. The easiest way for people to reduce cognitive dissonance is to change their beliefs, change what they believe about what they were doing, so that what they were saying actually wasn't a lie. It was true. Yeah, but yeah the pigs and the holes. It's great. Yeah, I um, I

agree with what you said said earlier. I think this helps to explain a lot of what goes on in our heads cognitive dissonance, both specifically as it applies to contradictory opinions and beliefs that that we we hold at once in our minds, as well as just more broadly, getting it the lack of a congruent self you know, yeah, because I mean human life, you're you're just gonna be full of contradictions. I mean, there is no way a

human can be consistent all the time. You're you're going to have pressures that are acting on your mind and going in multiple directions, and and most of the time these contradictions can exist within you without you really being aware of them. But once you become aware of them, I am pretty convinced that, yeah, it does manifest is

this type of stress that you've got to do something about. Yeah, Like you often see people using sort of like self defining mantras, you know, like I am this first, this second, this third, or you know, I am this and this and this or you know, you define yourself and your your profile on social media as being as being this

or that or the other. But you know, ultimately, if we're being honest, a lot of times it depends on on what time of day it is, when we last had a little boost of sugar caffeine, you know, how tired we are, um, how much sunlight we've been exposed to during the day, that sort of thing, how much

exercise we've had. Uh, those are some just some of the factors that can influence the ranking of those little um uh, those little phrases that we used to define ourselves, and and and even incorporating different phrases that we might not we not not have on the list, uh normally or certainly when we're you know, outward facing and dealing

with other people. Yeah, a lot of a lot of our lives are concerned with trying to create a consistent narrative about ourselves, and in fact, ourselves are just not that consistent. Yeah. And and really now, I mean, neither is our understanding of the past or memory of the

past or anything. I mean, it it's just it's it's so ridiculous the more you unravel it, Like, we were so obsessed with our our personal narratives and where we fit into it, when in reality, there is no past, you know, we are we are creatures of the present, traveling into the future. And uh, and yet we end up, you know, spending all this time fretting about things that are essentially fiction because all we have is just this, uh,

this copple together false memory of what we were. This ties back to previous episodes that we've done on the phenomenon of fundamental attribution error. The tendency for people to overestimate the role of like internal agency and character and underestimate the role of just external situations and forces in guiding what human behavior is. It turns out people are more malleable and more changeable based on situations than we

normally like to think. We like to think in terms of like, you know, consistent solid psychological storytelling, where John snow always stands for right and he just always does what is perfectly consistent with his character, and it's explained by who he is. But in fact, what we do a lot of times it's just explained by what's going on around us. But anyway, to come back to the cognitive dissonance question, one implication of cognitive dissonance is that

in fact, our beliefs are quite malleable. When beliefs are dissident with one another, it looks like, you know, it's people don't want to think this about themselves, but it seems to be true. We quite often and quite readily just change one of our beliefs. We just believe something

different to get them in line. So anyway, the study by Jack Brim looked at the question of whether cognitive dissonance might be a motivator, even when people are evaluating their own preferences, their own personal desires, just likes and dislikes, even with regards to very minor things like do you like this appliance or not? How much do you like it?

So the basics of the study, UH, you present people with a selection of different household items and appliances ranging in retail value for from fifteen dollars to thirty dollars but that was at the time a teen fifties dollars um. And then you ask the people to rate each of these items in terms of desirability. How much would you would you like to own this item on a scale of one to ten, from extremely desirable to definitely not desirable, all or sorry? I think I said one to ten.

It's one to eight, um, so you know you really want the eights, you don't really care about the ones. Uh. And the items included things like an automatic coffee maker, an electric sandwich grill, a silk screen reproduction and automatic toaster, a fluorescent desk lamp, a book of art reproductions, a stop watch, and a portable radio. And so, if I'm subject in this experiment, I go down the list, I do my ratings. I might rate the stop Watch at a three out of ten, I don't really care about

that much. Maybe the sandwich grill at a five, the coffee maker at a six, etcetera. And then after I'm finished with my ratings and they're taken away, the experiment er tells me that as part of my payment for participating, I'll get to take home my choice of one of two items from the list. But the experiment or picks

what the two are. So maybe he tells me that I can take home either the toaster or the coffee maker, which I rated equal, giving both a six, but I have to pick one, So I picked the coffee maker and I reject the toaster. Then some other conditions take place. Uh that there were various other control conditions, but the experiment ends at some point with me re rating the original objects again for desirability without being able to refer

to the ratings I had already made. And what the researchers found was, on average, if I was forced to pick between two objects, my desirability rating for the object I picked would go up, and my rating for the object I rejected would go down. So maybe I initially rated the toaster and the coffee maker both as a six. But then if I'm forced to pick between them and I picked the coffee maker, afterwards, I might rate the coffee maker is a seven and the toaster is a

four or something like that. Now, why would that be? Yeah, this is interesting because one of the one of the possible examples that came to mind when I was thinking about this was to go back to a previous episode that we recorded, thinking about how you know, back when when I was younger, you had, you know, like maybe twenty bucks to blow on a CD during the course of a month, and you made your pick, you bought it, and then even if it wasn't that great, you kind

of found a reason to like that album as you listen to it over and over again, you found at least one song. But in those cases, you have sunk cost in the situation, like I spent money on it um in addition to time, whereas in this scenario, uh,

it's there. Their money is not the issue. There's like I guess there's sort of a sunk cost in time, but we don't have that that financial aspect of the scenario, right, So the sunk cost fallacy does seem to be real, Like we make choice supportive, biased judgments in favor of stuff that we've already invested time and money and all that into. But here it's just like, well, you're gonna get one or the other, which one do you want?

And it seems like once you pick one out of the two, the one you didn't pick look like junk, and the one you did pick, oh, that's pretty great. I do find this. I think there's just you know, me thinking back on past experiences. But I feel like this with ice creams sometimes, like ultimately, most of the ice creams at then ice ice cream place, you know, they're gonna be great. I'm gonna enjoy them. They're just gonna be varying degrees of sweetness and uh, you know,

complex flavor, I guess. But I'll often find myself thinking, like, you know, afterwards, if I'm there with my family, will all, you know, sample each other's ice creams, and I'll generally go, yep, I made the right choice. This is the ice cream for me. Yep. Now there could be multiple reasons for that. One reason is extremely straightforward. One reason is you just picked the one you actually wanted most, you know what,

your preferences are and you acted them out. But there could be good at this, Yeah, there could be other things at work too, And so the underlying explanation based on cognitive dissonance for what was observed in the study, it goes something like this. When you evaluate how much you want to potential possessions, you think in a general way about the pros and cons of each, what do you like about them, what do you dislike about them?

Then if you are forced to choose between two options for which you see roughly similar amounts of pros and cons, it creates one of these mildly stressful states of cognitive dissonance. And again that sounds funny because like, how could that be stressful? But it looks like this just does manifest a stress in our brains, even though it doesn't really make a lot of sense that it would. So you didn't choose the toaster, even though there are things that

you like about the toaster, etcetera. And this uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance has a name actually, when it's applied to expensive purchases, when you've spent money on it, it's known as buyer's remorse. Right, Okay, I need to buy a lawnmower. But you know, what the hell do I know about lawnmowers. I can't tell one from the other. They cost a lot of money, but I need one,

and I can't really tell them apart. So I'm just gonna have to pick one of these here at the store and buy it so I can cut the grass. But after you've made a purchase like this, okay, big dollar item, you've spent a lot on it, you you just picked one, people often experience a sinking feeling, this form of stress and psychological discomfort. Did I buy the

right one? And you think about what might have been good about the ones you didn't buy, and you think about what might be wrong with the one you did buy. So to eliminate the stress of this dissonance, the theory goes that your brain simply changes your beliefs. You change your beliefs about what you prefer and what you want, emphasizing the pros and de emphasizing the cons of the option you chose, and vice versa for the option you rejected.

And it makes sense in a weird way, right, I Mean, we often think of that our beliefs should be these these core and just fixed things about ourselves, you know, uh that you know, although the wind and the raging of the world just move around, but uh, you know, from from the mind standpoint, it's like, well, uh, this is causing a problem. Let's let's change this circuit here, because we're getting some some feedback that that is not

optimal for the system. Right. Um. Now. I will note that, of course, as always, these these results apply on average, and it's interesting to think about other ways that some people might reduce cognitive dissonance in this kind of situation without changing their original preferences, without changing their opinions about

what's desirable. I think one very common adaptive strategy is the adaptive strategy of internally de emphasizing the importance of possessions, which, in fact, in reality, which you know, moment to moment, reduces the cognitive dissonance that arises from making choices about possessions. Yeah, sort of realizing, well, a lawnlowers don't really matter. It doesn't it's just the thing, and I'm going to spend a certain amount on it. It's just I'm gonna spend

what it costs. I'm gonna get whichever one is just easiest. To obtain in the smoking example. I think this is kind of the this is equivalent to the like who wants to live forever? Option, but thinking about you know, consumer items instead of your life, Like I'm not reckless with my health, I'm just very zen about this whole smoking thing, right. I think it makes more sense to try to do the zen path about the lawnmower material possessions. But hey, I mean that's hard. I mean, we shouldn't

just like blithely say everybody should do that. But I mean it's difficult to do that. People, you're spending your money, that is your labor. You're you're thinking, oh God, did I did I get it right? Um and and the same even manifest when you're just making a decision about what appliance you want to take home after spending an

afternoon doing an experiment. Um and And I should also note that there have been some competing explanations for this phenomenon, but it seems like cognitive dissonance is favored by the

experts and supported by a lot of other experiments. Um So, I wanted to note in this experiment there were a couple of interesting control conditions and additional hypotheses tested that ended up not receiving support from the data, so I'm not going to get into those, but I did want to mention one control condition, the gift condition, and this provides an interesting variation on what they found. So there is some indication that owning something makes people see that

thing as more desirable. So what if it was the effect of ownership of this appliance they received that made the difference, rather than reduction of cognitive dissonance arising from your choices. Well, to control for that, in this gift condition, the subject did not get to choose which item they would receive. It was just picked for them and given as a gift by by the experimenter. And what Brim found is that this control condition did not produce effects

to challenge the main finding. So it really did look like, at least from this experiment, that people's ratings were actually changed by the choices they made and not just by feelings associated with ownership or feelings from what you're taking home. It wasn't the fact that you have the coffee maker that makes it seem better. It was the fact that you chose it. You know, when this is this gets more complicated and perhaps it's just looked at more in

the appropriate literature surrounding it. But I'm instantly reminded of some of the advertising mechanics that I've encountered recently on YouTube, where I'm watching a show that that I that we regularly watch, and then I'll instead of just being served an ad, I get served a little choice that says, which of the following ads would you like to receive most? I wonder if that is a mechanic that's playing into

some of this. Oh yes, so like if you choose it, maybe the ideas you'll actually be uh less resentful of the ad and more likely to pay attention to it and listen all the way through. Yeah, I wonder, yeah, maybe, because I know is the choice is never like um, it's never a wonderful like an easy choice. It's not like do you want to see an ad for the new Star Wars TV show? Or do you want to watch an insurance commercial? Now, it's always like which insurance

commercial would you like to watch? Well, it's got to be the one with that really nice lady. Was one with a really nice lady who's always really nice? Oh? Yeah, I guess I like the weird ones, give me the give me the yeah, the gecko ones c g I geck yeah, make me not realize it was for insurance

and and never think twice about what the product actually was. Okay, So, just to read the top line from the conclusion of brim study quote, the results supported the prediction that choosing between alternatives would create dissonance and attempts to reduce it by making the chosen alternative more desirable and the unchosen

alternative less desirable. Yeah. This reminds me of another paper, Joe that I think you're familiar with, Love the one You're with by Stephen Stills at All Yep, when you know when you're down, when you're confused and you don't remember how you rated the items originally now uh more. Seriously, though, I'm not sure if this completely sticks, but I instantly looking over all this, I started thinking about the still

relevant divide over gaming systems. So back when I was a kid, Like the first major choice I think I had to make because I was an ne Ne Ne s kid, and then came the choice Super nes or Saga Genesis, and then eventually later comes to PlayStation Xbox Divide, and I think that's that's still very much alive today. But but basically, you know, one often has to make a

choice which prices system they're going to invest in. And this also impacts certain console exclusives, right Like, if you're a Nintendo White, then you're gonna get Mario and so you can end up on Team Mario. If you're a Sagatarian, then you're gonna you're gonna be a follower of Saints Sonic, the Hedgehog and may you know, maybe Saint Altered Beast. Xbox. You're gonna get Gears of War. In Halo PlayStation, you're gonna get Gods of War and or God of War

whatever it was, and the Last Office. So um. You know, on on one level, on like a very rational level, you engage with in some decision making. You're like, well, uh I know this franchise as a console exclusive, I'm gonna go this direction. But in other cases, uh I do looking back, I do find myself having engaged in

some of that. You know, like I didn't really have a huge opinion on the whole Mario Sonic divide, and yet I found at times someone like today will bring up Mario and Sonic and be like oh, well, you know, Mario was cool, but Sonic was a bit lame. Sonic was a bit a bit of a pu Pucci, and

I realistically have to agree with them. But I have this impulse to defend Sonic because I was a Saga player, because I had the Saga Genesis, and even though I didn't really love Sonic the Hedgehog like he was, still I was still on that team, you know. So I'm still reeling from Sonic being a Pucci, which I think

is highly accurate. I'm sorry it is. No, I I agree, I rationally agree with you, but I have this irrational response, this knee jerk reaction to defend him for some reason, even though I never completed a Sonic game and ultimately don't have a real strong opinion on Sonic versus Mario. I didn't. I played both of them at some point or another. Uh, and I didn't particularly, you know, I

don't really rationally love one more than the other. Yeah, I mean, I think ideas like which video game console you buy that that goes in the same direction as a lot of these sort of like consumer options that people choose between, where I think clearly like both kinds of considerations are going to be feeding in like there are some just genuine preference differences, like you can look at like which games you can get on each one and have a genuine desire to play one more than

the other. But then there's also probably some choice supportive bias kicking in and how you retrospectively think about making the choice and which one you'd like better? And I guess I should say that A less favored but also possibly viable explanation for for this phenomenon um like observed in Brim study is known as self perception theory. Basically, this is an alternative to cognitive dissonance theory that comes down to the principle that people form their internal perceptions

of the self by observing external action ends. So, how do you decide what your preferences are? Will you actually decide them by observing what you choose? And so if this were the correct interpretation, this would also explain choice induced preference change, which is what the phenomenon would come to be known as choice induced preference change. You make the choice and that changes retrospectively what you think your preferences are. And Brim's results have been replicated many times

across many studies. Uh, there are, there are some disagreements, but it appears to me to be a pretty solid conclusion that not only do our preferences influence our choices, but our choices really do influence our preferences. And this probably happens in both positive and negative directions. So again, just like in that first study, our preferences for options that we choose increase, and our preferences for options that we reject decrease. And I think the second condition is

especially interesting. It explains something that I've often observed, and it totally that so many things in life are once discarded despised. Almost as soon as you have committed to rejecting an option, you can suddenly think of all kinds of reasons why that option was bad anyway, The cons just boil up into your brain. Yeah, this is interesting. Um. I thought about this in terms of video games, but then I think I thought of an even better example,

and that is, um, the music of Metallica. So so i'm i'm I. I always try to be a polite person about things that I like and what things other people like. So you know, if at any point someone was to come up to me and be like, hey, I'm really excited about Metallica, or you know, I'm listening to this old Metallic album. I'm trying to have this new Metallic album. I would probably be like, oh, yeah, yeah, Metallic is cool. But if I if I'm being if I'm being honest, like there was there was a time

in my life where I was super into Metallica. I was like, you know, discovering those those albums for the first time, know uh, you know, you know, Ride the Lightning and so forth for me. For me, that was like Metallica City. Yeah, yeah, it was. I think I I was maybe just starting college or maybe it was finishing high school when I really started getting into them. But it was like, you know, everything from the Black

album prior. I was like, this is amazing and um, and then at some point I was like, uh, basically I less. I stopped listening to them for a very long time, and then more recently I started listening to them again. And and that's like the realistic read on it. But on some level, I do feel like when I discarded Metallica, I was like, yeah, Metallica kind of sucks. Like those guys are jerks. Uh, They're newer stuff is

not any good. You know, all these various things you kind of heap onto the pile, which is ridiculous because hey, I used to really like them, and then I would have to like current me would have to point out to then me, you're going to like them again. There's gonna be a come of time in where you suddenly starts streaming a bunch of old Metaca albums again, and uh, and it's not going to make sense with this current rejection of them. Is A is A is A is

a musical entity. This is really funny because just this week I started listening to their first two albums again. I wonder why that happened. Is there something in common that did this come up in a previous talk we had. I don't think we've really talked about Metauica recently. I

mean it comes up time to time. But metal serendipity, I I find very interesting that I love the stupid ideology of their early albums, which there is presumed to be some kind of great conflict over the concept of metal. And one of the things that's great about early early albums within a genre is that they're often very much about the genre. So like you know, like early rock music is all about what rocking is and instructing you

to rock. Uh, They're like early rap songs that are about rapping and about and telling people how to wrap. And their early metal albums are vertty much all about metal, and Metallica's early albums are are all about the concept of metal and what it means to fight in the metal wars. I love this, Yeah, I have a big I really love house music as well, and of course there's so many different types of house music to listen to, but I still have a very warm place for house

music that informs you that this is house music. We have a voice telling you you are listening to house music, and I'm like, that's great. I don't get enough music that is very explicit about the genre that I'm listening to. That's excellent. I wonder what age a genre mostly stops being about the concept of itself as a genre is like metal today isn't usually very much about the concept of metal, like early thresh metal was. Yeah, I don't know.

I guess it just evolves to a certain certain point. Um. Now, of course, in all of this, you know, not to get too far off the point here, I think also you have that kind of like Evan flow of nostalgia, right, So the thing you're into then you get out of, and then you can reach a point where you look back on it only and get back into it at least some degree. But it's funny because I went through a cycle that exactly mirrors yours. Like I liked them when I was younger, and then after once I stopped

listening to them. Wasn't a deliberate choice. I just kind of moved on to other things. And then I look back on music that I used to listen to and don't listen to anymore, and often feel this, uh, this, this kind of sting this thing like Okay, I mean, I guess what's probably very much going on is I don't listen to it. I'm supporting that choice to not listen to it by changing my beliefs about it and

deciding that it's dumb anyway than now. Following up from Brim's original study in the fifties, like I said, there have been a bunch of replications, but there have also been some interesting questions. Like one study I was looking at investigated something about the methodology of the test, so it was it was trying to see if the results

stand up to challenges to brims original method. And the paper I was looking at here was by Tally Shiro, Christina M. Velasquez, and Raymond J. Dolan, published in Psychological Science in two thousand ten, called do Decisions Shape Preference? Evidence from blind Choice? Now that this was pretty interesting.

So the authors here begin by noting some papers all the ones I saw, were associated with their researcher named mk Chen that noticed a potential problem with Brem's method, such that it could be telling us something different than what we think it does. And the critique goes like this in uh, in the author's hiro at all's words here quote, people's preferences cannot be measured perfectly and are

subject to rating noise. Okay, true, as participants gain experience with the rating scale, they will provide more accurate ratings, such that post choice shifts in ratings simply reflect the unmasking of the participants initial preferences, which can be predicted by their choices, rather than reflecting any changes in preference induced by the choice. Uh So does that make sense? Basically?

I think what they're saying is that maybe when people change their desirability ratings of two things that are initially similar after being forced to pick one or the other. What's happening is not an ex post facto reevaluation of their preferences, but people are just getting better with successive tries at expressing their genuine, pre existing preferences on the rating scale used in the experiment. It seems like a

reasonable critique that that would be worth looking into. Yeah, yeah, and I think we can all see examples of that or find examples of that where you're just like, well, I was trying out this one musical genre. It turns out that just one my thing. Or like I think back on video games and I'm like, yeah, I eventually realized I'm just not good at real time strategy games.

I just don't like them as much they don't. It's just not my deal, right, So it would be that the actual preferences in the beginning were what was revealed in the second rating, and you're just getting better at expressing them rather than changing them. Uh So, the authors of this two thousands ten study tried to design an experiment that couldn't be subject to that problem, and what they came up with was what they called a blind choice model as opposed to a free choice model. So

what's the difference. Well, in a free choice model, again, remember you would rate a number of options according to your preference. Then you'd be forced to choose between some subset of them. Then later you rate the options again. In this study, what was different was that people didn't know what two options from the list they were choosing

between until they had made their choice. So you're given a hypothetical list of vacation destinations and you rate them in terms of how much you'd like to go there for a vacation, so you know, Rome, Cairo, et cetera. Then, after the initial rating task, you are asked to choose blindly between a binary subset for a hypothetical vacation, but you can't see what they are. Is you have option A and option B, but the actual locations are hidden,

and you choose one. Once you choose between them, the options are then revealed, so it's like, oh, so it seems you've picked Making instead of Tuscany or whatever. Uh, And and then once it's all over, you will be asked to rate the options again. So so does that make sense that you can't see what the options are you're just making a choice without any information at all,

just complete blind choice. And they also included a couple of control conditions where a computer made the decision for people, so you don't get to make a choice at all, to see if the perception of personal agency was important even though the choice was made blind. And it's not just a case of like picking a door and then what's behind door number three? Because at least in that

scenario you picked three. But in this there's like a robot game show host that as you walk up and then it just says you're getting a toaster, right, you get what's behind door number three? That that's the difference there. And so what did the study find. Quote, We found that preferences were altered after participants made a blind choice, but not when a computer instructed the participants decision. The results suggests that just as preferences form choices, choices shape preferences.

So this is confirming to some degree Brem's original results. It looks like, yes, these studies have not merely been tracking how people get better at assigning ratings to their pre existing preferences. What people want and prefer really does seem to change, So that it falls in line with

what they have already chosen. And this study also reveals this very interesting wrinkle, choice induced preference change can happen even when we are not making an informed choice but just choosing randomly between two options that are temporarily hidden,

which which is very interesting. So there's some part of us that, again, if the if the cognitive dissonance interpretation of this phenomenon is correct, there's some part of us that feels a kind of agency that needs to be accounted for in what you chose, even if you didn't know what you were choosing, Even if you're just choosing you know, hats and you can't see what's inside them, or or yeah, door number three, you still feel like

I picked that and I need to justify that decision internally. Huh, Yeah, that that is That is interesting. I'm surprised we we don't see more of this utilized in online advertising, you know, like maybe there's a version of that YouTube scenarios describing earlier where instead of giving you a choice of specific as, it says, what do you want ad number one or add number two? And maybe it's a completely false choice.

You know you're always going to get the same ad, but they are going to give you the provide this illusion that you had to say. Well, this is interesting because when people do not have the illusion that they have a say, then apparently the effect does not hold because again thing back to the computer condition. At least in this study, choice induced preference change only seems to apply if you think it's really you making the choice, not if some someone or something else chooses for you.

And this mirror is what brim found in the gift condition. If you're given three options and then the computer says Okay, of these three options, you get number three, it doesn't have you don't change your evaluations afterwards. Now, to come back to the black mirror, Bandersnatch episode, which again is a choose your own adventure type episode where you make choices when you watch it in Netflix. Um, I remember

when I rewatched it last year for our episode. I ended up being really pleased with the way it came together based on my choices. But it was because what was it? Because I actually hit on a good combo of narrative branches and this choose your own adventure world?

Or or was it this? You know? Because to a certain extent, there are aspects of of of all this, and in the blind test, you know you don't necessarily know how the choices you make will impact the overall shape of the narrative by the time you're done with it. That's a really good comparison. I mean, I feel well, I mean thinking about how I interacted with Bandersnatch or with Choose your Own Adventure books when I was a kid.

It's funny how we feel some amount of angst and personal accountability, or at least I did, for how the Bandersnatch or that Choose your Own Adventure choices turn out, even though there's usually no way you could have predicted the ways that they will actually play out in narrative.

Merely the suggestion that you're in control seems to be enough to conjure the shadow of personal agency over the direction of the narrative, and thus I think enough to bring in the feeling of cognitive dissonance when you choose a path that goes somewhere you don't like or that

feels bad or increases the tension. Yeah. So there's another study, and an older study that I wanted to mention briefly, and this one is from the year two thousand ten that looks at choice induced preference change in children and non human animals. And I thought that this was very interesting because this seems to get to because you could wonder, like, ok so, it seems like this choice induced preference change thing,

it really does go on. But is this a function of like like adult cognition, you know, adult pictures of the self, or would this happen at a more primal level that you would see even in you know, uh, even in four year old children and in monkeys and stuff. And and it looks like the answer is basically yes, you do see this even in four year old children

and capuchin monkeys. Now you might wonder how you could how you could create the test conditions there, because you can't like ask them to to like rate a list of appliances or something. Right, Um, so the study design here for for human children. It's kind of complicated to explain, but once I read it, I thought it was actually very elegant and ingenious. So if you don't mind, I just want to read their description of their experimental set up here. Oh and sorry, I don't think I said

that this. Uh This paper is by Luisa see Egan Paul Bloom and Laurie are Santos in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in two thousand ten um so to read from their their methodology. With the test condition involving human children, quote, the experiment or first displayed an opaque gray stocking to the child and sequentially extracted three toys, described as some of the experimenter's favorite things, which were really fun, but you have to be creative with them.

The toys distended the stockings such that the contours of each could be seen, but the color could not be discerned. The experiment are extracted and displayed the three toys to the child, described them as some of her favorite things, then shuffled them as she lifted them behind an occluder and announced that she would hide the toys. She removed the occluder to display two stockings, one dotted and one argyle.

The experiment or pointed out that the outlines of two toys were visible within one of the stockings, and that the outline of the third toy was visible in the second stocking. In the choice condition, the experiment are held up the stocking with two toys and asked the child

to reach in without peaking and choose a toy. In the no choice condition, the experiment or reached into the stocking with two toys, pulled one closer to the mouth of the stocking, held up the stocking, and asked the child to remove the toy on top again without peaking. In phase two, a second experiment or blind to which stocking originally contained two toys, indicated the two stockings and asked the child to choose a toy to play with.

Children were instructed not to peek before making their selection. So what were the results here? Well, in the choice condition, children strongly preferred the toy in the second stocking, meaning the toy that they had not had a chance to reject from the first stocking. Uh and and they preferred sixty six point seven percent of children in the choice condition went for the new toy in the second stocking instead of the one that they hadn't grabbed from from

the first stocking. But in the no choice condition, remember this is the one where the experiment or picks for the kid. The kid doesn't get to pick themselves, the effect vanished. In fact, in the condition where the toy was chosen for them, kids did the opposite with the majority wanting to reach into the first stocking again and get the other toy. And remember that this is despite them fishing the toys out at random. Uh. And there

was also a similar test on capuchin monkeys. I'm not going to go into as much detail, and that one it involves skittles instead of toys, and it found the same thing. When monkeys were tricked into believing that they had a choice between two initial candies, and then they were given the option to choose between the previously rejected candy of the first two and a new third alternative. They overwhelmingly preferred the new alternative instead of the one

that they had not chosen in the previous choice. So again, it looks kind of like once discarded, now despised. But as with women children, this was only true if the monkeys were made to think they had a free choice between the first two. If the choice was clearly made for them and they didn't get to pick, they no longer seemed to devalue the other option from the first pair of candies. Uh. That that's very interesting to me.

And it's interesting that if this manifests in children and monkeys, it seems like choice induced preference change obviously doesn't depend on any sort of like adult sense of self image or sophisticated logical logical reasoning. Based on this study, if if this holds up, it appears that our choices may influence our preferences at a fairly primal level. And I want to read from a section that from their conclusion that picks up on one of the things I noted

about the children's no choice condition. So quote Curiously, we observed a marginally significant effect in which children in the no choice condition. Remember that this one where they didn't get to pick the experiment or picked for them out of the first stock, they preferred the toy that the

experiment or did not give them. Although we had originally hypothesized that children would be at chance on this condition, the observed pattern of performance hence that children's preferences may change not merely because of their choices, but also because of their lack of choices. Consistent with Brims nineteen sixty six reactance theory and Brim and Wine Troubs research on reactants and two year olds, children's preferences may reflect psychological

reactants when choice freedom is denied. So and the possibility uh here is that the effect is not only not present when you perceive somebody else's denying you a free choice, there could be a reverse effect. Once one of two options is denied you by an outside force, the denied

option is not only not despised, it's coveted. You want that thing that you were told you couldn't have, Yeah, I imagine we can a lot of us can imagine remember childhood examples of this, you know, like the the toy you were not permitted to have, the the book that was denied to you, that sort of thing. Yeah. Now, now, of course, there are always gonna be reasons for this that make it makes sense in your brain, like they're intrinsic qualities to that toy or that book or something

that seemed like that's why I really wanted. But it seems like even among toys that are identical, there there is this preference that arises from Uh. It seems like if we have had the option to pick something and we didn't pick it, afterwards, it's it becomes far less interesting to us. We don't really want it at all.

But if we were presented with something as a possible option and we're not given the opportunity to get it, then we really wanted So anyway, I was looking around for some challenges to the to the choice induce preference change phenomenon, and I was trying to find if there are any studies that found the opposite. There are a few. For example, I found this paper which criticizes the interpretation of Brim's original findings and the replications um and it

attempts a modified replication of its own. So this was by Steiner Holden polition in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Do choices affect preferences? Some doubts and new evidence, And the author here says quote, I find no evidence of choice induced changes in preferences after a choice between items where one was viewed as more attractive than the other, but potentially some weak evidence of changes in preferences after a choice between items viewed as equally attractive. So that's

worth keeping in mind. There are some challenges to this phenomenon, and in its robustness that this does appear to be a minority finding, and in fact it doesn't fully contradict to the other results, it only partially contradicts them. But then finally I wanted to get to one last study I was reading this was actually the one I was reading about that made me want to do this episode in the first place. It's a very recent study on choice induced preference change, this time in human babies in

improve verbal human infants, published just this year. So this is by alex M. Silver, Amy, E. Stall Rita Loyaltial, Alexis S. Smith Flores, and Lisa Feigenson. When not choosing leads to not liking Choice induced preference in Infancy, published in Psychological Science this year. Some of the authors were affiliated with JOHNS. Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh, and

the College of New Jersey. And again they tested for choice induced preference change in pre verbal infants across seven studies with a methodology that's uh somewhat similar to one of the ones we looked at earlier, with the ones testing with four year olds and capuchin monkeys and UH from from their conclusion and discussion, they say, quote, our findings suggests that choice induced preference change does not require extensive experience making choices, nor does it rely on advanced

metacognitive ability or developed sense of self. Because they found this in pre verbal infants. If pre verbal infants are changing their their preferences based on what they've chosen. It seems like it really would not require any of those things. It's happening at some lower level in the brain. And it also raises interesting questions about how preferences get formed very early in life, if they might stem from choices

made at random in some sense when you're a baby. Uh, like they say, quote, our findings add to our understanding of the role of choice in infancy, showing that infants use their own choices to shape their preferences. This work raises the question of whether other aspects of the psychology

of decision making also have their roots in very early life. So, yeah, that doesn't make me wonder if, like, there are things that adults are still carrying trying to keep a consistent narrative about their preferences, their likes and dislikes that may have their roots may have emerged at some point when they made some basically random decision as a pre verbal infant.

In't that weird? That is weird? Yeah, Yeah, it's like you don't want to dwell on the past and to think that you know choices in your past to find you. But what if those are baby choices? What if it all treads down to baby choices? Right? What if things that you think of as fundamental to your you know, your own idiosyncrasies, your your view of yourself, are rooted in you just trying to stay consistent with something that

happened when you were two, yeah, or one, even? I mean you know, I picked I picked the yellow block instead of the red block, and and ever since then, yellow has been my preferred color. Interesting, Um, I had a I had a scenario in my head. I'm not I don't think this one necessarily applies, but perhaps you have. You have an opinion on it based on what we've discussed so far. In the movie A Christmas Story, the old man receives a major award, which of course turns

out to be a lamp that looks like a woman's leg. Um, how would you, um interpret his attachment to the major award? Well, clearly he he is suffering from a kind of preference bias about the major award. That's like a self flattering bias of some kind. I'm not sure best how to categorize it. I don't think it would be choice induced

preference change because he didn't pick the leg lamp. It was picked for him, and the studies have showed that when things are picked for you, this effect does not manifest. But I think he's doing a different kind of thing, which is um, the leg lamp is a symbol of his intellectual prowess and victory, and thus the leg lamp

is itself beautiful and good. Yes, all right. And then of course there's the added wrinkle that his wife does not like the award and does not think it should be in the front of the house, which he regards as a personal insult because he has so deeply associated this lamp with his with his personal intellectual abilities mind power. Uh. This all also made me think of another great work, um that would be a Paradise Lost by by Milton.

We have that line from Satan, the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell a hell of heaven. That's yeah, that's that's really good because I've never interpreted this line in that way as like a reflection of an ex post facto justification to reduce cognitive dissonance. But you could absolutely read it

that way. You can totally see it like that. I mean, I've always interpreted it, I guess as um, you know, just a statement about like, you know, the power to like Satan is asserting that he can make what he will of any situation. But yeah, you could interpret that much more in a cognitive bias way, where he's saying like, well, you know, I made my decisions, and my decisions led me to hell, and thus I will engage in choice supportive biased reasoning that makes me think, actually, actually hell

is good. It's good, you know, you know, uh, and that reduces the cognitive dissonance within Satan's soul. What if you just had a vision of help where everybody's in that where people are they're just all setting around, you know, being tortured or torturing each other, and like this place is great, this is great. I don't Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's a fantastic image In with Yeah, we ended by justifying the ways of God demands, so it's

generally what we seek to do in this uh this podcast. Wait, no, aren't we justifying the ways of Satan demand? I think that's what we did. Oh yeah, I guess that's all what we're doing here. Yeah, even better, Yeah, a lesser go, a lower goal. All right, Well, we'll go and close this one out. I think this will be a fun one for listeners to reflect on, especially since I think

we actually had a stocking based experiment there. Maybe you can reflect on on on on gift giving and stockings and and so forth with the holiday season that we're passing through at the moment. Uh, certainly everybody can relate on some level to some of the mental mechanics that we're discussing here in this episode. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find them wherever you get

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