http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
In cognitive science, choice-supportive bias is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected. It is a cognitive bias.
What is remembered about a decision can be as important as the decision itself, especially in determining how much regret or satisfaction one experiences. [1] Research indicates that the process of making and remembering choices yields memories that tend to be distorted in predictable ways. [1] In cognitive science, one predictable way that memories of choice options are distorted is that positive aspects tend to be remembered as part of the chosen option, whether or not they originally were part of that option, and negative aspects tend to be remembered as part of rejected options. [1] Once an action has been taken, the ways in which we evaluate the effectiveness of what we did may be biased. [2] It is believed this may influence our future decision-making. These biases may be stored as memories, which are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals, and the social context. True and false memories arise by the same mechanism because when the brain processes and stores information, it cannot tell the difference from where they came from.
Theory [edit]
Experiments in cognitive science and social psychology have revealed a wide variety of biases in areas such as statistical reasoning, social attribution, and memory. [2]
Choice-supportive memory distortion is thought to occur during the time of memory retrieval and was the result of the belief that, "I chose this option, therefore it must have been the better option." [4] 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. [4] In addition, biases can also arise because they are closely related to the high level cognitive operations and complex social interactions. [5]
Memory distortions may sometimes serve a purpose because it may be in our interest to not remember some details of an event or to forget others altogether.
Brain areas of interest [edit]
There is extensive evidence that the amygdala is involved in effectively influencing memory. [12] Emotional arousal, usually fear based, activates the amygdala and results in the modulation of memory storage occurring in other brain regions. The forebrain is one of the targets of the amygdala. The forebrain receives input from amygdala and calculates the emotional significance of the stimulus, generates an emotional response, and transmits it to cerebral cortex. This can alter the way neurons respond to future input, and therefore cognitive biases, such as choice-supportive bias can influence future decisions.
Choice-supportive bias increases with age [edit]
Studies now show that as people age, their process of memory retrieval changes. Although general memory problems are common to everyone because no memory is perfectly accurate, older adults are more likely than younger adults to show choice-supportive biases.
Aging of the brain [edit]
Normal aging may be accompanied by neuropathy in the frontal brain regions. Frontal regions help people encode or use specific memorial attributes to make source judgments, controls personality and the ability to plan for events. These areas can attribute to memory distortions and regulating emotion.
Regulation of emotion [edit]
In general, older adults are more likely to remember emotional aspects of situations than are younger adults. For example, on a memory characteristic questionnaire, older adults rated remembered events as having more associated thoughts and feelings than did younger adults. As a person ages, regulating personal emotion becomes a higher priority, whereas knowledge acquisition becomes less of a powerful motive. Therefore choice-supportive bias would arise because their focus was on how they felt about the choice rather than on the factual details of the options. Studies have shown that when younger adults are encouraged to remember the emotional aspect of a choice, they are more likely to show choice-supportive bias. This may be related to older adults' greater tendency to show a positivity effect in memory.
Rely on familiarity [edit]
Older adults rely more than younger adults on categorical or general knowledge about an event to recognize particular elements from the event. [1] Older adults are also less likely to correctly remember contextual features of events, such as their color or location. This may be because older adults remember (or rely on) fewer source identifying characteristics than the young. Consequently, older adults must more often guess or base a response on less specific information, such as familiarity. [14] As a result, if they can’t remember something, they are more likely to fill in the missing gaps with things that are familiar to them. [5]
Getting the 'gist' [edit]
Older adults are more reliant on gist-based retrieval. A number of studies suggest that using stereotypes or general knowledge to help remember an event is less cognitively demanding than relying on other types of memorial information and thus might require less reflective activity. This shift towards gist-based processes might occur as a compensation for age decrements in verbatim memory. [15]
Inhibition [edit]
The episodic memory and inhibition accounts of age-related increases in false memories. Inhibition of a memory may be related to an individual’s hearing capacity and attention span. If the person cannot hear what is going on around them or is not paying much attention, the memory cannot be properly stored and therefore cannot be accurately retrieved.