Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions

Citation: Timothy Wilson, Jonathan Schooler (1991) Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Pyschology (RSS)
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Tagged: Sociology (RSS) Sociology (RSS), Social Psychology (RSS), Personality (RSS)

Summary

The purpose of this paper was to examine the effects of two types of introspection on decision making when compared to expert opinion and personal long term satisfaction. The authors hypothesize that what seems like a plausible cause and what actually determines people's reactions in decision making are not always the same thing. The authors suggest that under some circumstances when pressed to search for reasons, people will focus on reasons that imply a different attitude that the attitude that was originally held, and will adopt that attitude. As such, the authors believe that thinking about reasons can alter people's preferences in such a way that they make less than optimal choices that lead to less than optimal satisfaction in the long run.

In study 1, the authors compared subjects' preferences for different brands of strawberry jam to the ratings of these brands by trained food experts. They hypothesized that the the control group would have preferences that corresponded reasonably well to the experts' ratings and that the group asked to analyze their reasoning would change their own initial preferences, and therefore would not correspond very well with the experts' ratings. 49 undergrad students volunteered for the study and were asked to sample five types of jam. One group received instructions asking them to "analyze why you feel the way you do" about each type of jam, in order to prepare themselves for jam evaluations while the other group did not receive any additional instructions. Consistent with the author's prediction, there was a significant effect of the reasons analysis manipulation. Subjects in this group seemed to have come up with reasons that conflicted with experts' ratings and adopted the attitude implied by these reasons. It appears that analyzing reasons did not moderate subjects' judgement; rather it changed their minds about what aspects were most important in evaluation. The study also showed that the attitude change caused by analyzing reasons is for the most part, temporary. As predicted, subjects who analyzed their reasons for jam preference were less satisfied with their choices a few weeks after the study.

In study 2, the authors examined students' choices of which courses to take and compared those choices with expert opinions about what the best course choices were. 243 undergrad students were given detailed information about nine psychology courses. The authors' then examined their ratings and observed whether they actually registered for their highest-rated courses. The experts in this study were students who had taken the courses before. The authors hypothesized that the subjects under control conditions would be most likely to choose courses recommended by previous students (i.e. the highest rated courses) and that the subjects who analyzed their reasoning would change their decision-making criteria and therefore be less likely to sign up for the highest rated courses. The authors' also hypothesized that introspection might confuse subjects about which pieces of course information were most import, therefore causing them to assign more equal weights to different information. Subjects in the experiment were assigned to three groups: control condition, rate all condition, and reasons condition. The rate all condition meant that subjects were asked to stop and think about each piece of information and rate whether it made them more or less likely to take the course. The reasons condition had to write down their reasons for why they would or would not want to take a course. The control condition merely read information about the nine courses. Results indicated that as predicted, subjects in the control group showed more of a preference for the higher rated courses than the subjects in the rate all condition. There was surprisingly no significant difference between the control group and the reasons group. Additionally, subjects in the non-control groups were less likely to actually register for the highly rated courses and equally likely to take the poorly rated courses. Subjects in the rate all condition appeared to have made much less optimal choices than the control group; the reasons group also made for less optimal choices, but the effects were not as strong as the effects of the rate all group.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

The authors suggest that it may not always be a good idea to analyze reasons for our preferences too deeply. However, if people start out with preferences that are non optimal, the change that results from introspection could be a positive factor towards decision-making. In addition, if subjects were more knowledgable about their attitudes, introspection regarding their reasoning did not change their decisions.