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Choice-Supportive Bias
What Is Choice-Supportive Bias?
The Quick Answer
In Critical Thinking, choice-supportive bias is overly protecting an early choice or decision. It also sees people giving too much weight to ideas that support the early choice and underrating ideas that contest it.Here's a short example to illustrate choice-supportive bias:
Suppose you are deciding between two smartphones, A and B. After careful consideration, you choose smartphone A based on its features and price. Following your decision, you may start emphasizing the positive aspects of smartphone A, such as its sleek design, user-friendly interface, and long battery life. Simultaneously, you may downplay the positive features of smartphone B, such as its superior camera or expandable storage capacity.
Choice-supportive bias occurs due to cognitive dissonance, which is the discomfort individuals experience when they hold contradictory beliefs or attitudes. To reduce this discomfort, individuals engage in biased information processing, highlighting the positive aspects of their choice and minimizing the positive aspects of the alternatives.This bias helps individuals maintain a sense of consistency and confidence in their decision-making. By positively reinforcing their choice, individuals protect their self-esteem and reduce doubts about their decision. However, it can lead to a distorted perception of the options and hinder objective evaluation.
Recognizing choice-supportive bias is important to make more rational and informed decisions. It involves actively considering the positive aspects of unchosen alternatives and critically evaluating the chosen option. By being aware of this bias, individuals can strive to make more balanced and objective assessments, reducing the influence of post-decisional bias on their evaluations.

Easy Definition of Choice-Supportive Bias
Don't defend a decision or exaggerate how good it was just because you made it. Either of those would be choice-supportive bias.
Academic Definition of Choice-Supportive Bias
Choice-supportive bias is the tendency for a decision-maker to defend his own decision or to later rate it better than it was simply because he made it.
An Example of Choice-Supportive Bias
I told you it was the right decision

However, as soon as he was captured, the White House was not slow in using this to win support for the decision to go to war. Of course, capturing Saddam was never part of that decision. Their effort to lever it in as evidence to defend the decision to go to war was an example of choice-supportive bias.
A Practical Application for Choice-Supportive Bias
Admit you got it wrong earlier and limit the damage

It took me half of the next day arguing with myself to accept it was a mess. I spent that half of the day arguing that it would look okay once the rest was done, talking up the oil's wood-preservation attributes and convincing myself that it didn't look too milky. I was looking for evidence to support my decision to use a relatively expensive clear varnish over a cheaper coloured one. Luckily, a more objective assessment of the decking situation saved me hours of work. Once I realised I was suffering from choice-supportive bias, I only had to sand the half I'd ruined back to the bare wood.
This is a common theme with biases:
"Being aware of a bias (including knowing its name) helps you counter it."
"Being aware of a bias (including knowing its name) helps you counter it."
Another Practical Application for Choice-Supportive Bias
Don't defend bad decisions. Keep checking whether a decision was good

Nobody likes to be accused of poor judgement, so defending decisions is a natural thing to do. Knowing not to defend a bad decision is important, but it's only half of what is required. The decisions and assumptions that influence your work should be routinely tested. Analysts are taught to bear this in mind:
"The fatal tendency of mankind to stop thinking about something when a decision has been made is the cause of half their errors."
(British philosopher J.S. Mill, 1806–1873)
Decisions are good. They help you move forward, but they should not be blindly defended or assumed to be forever correct once made.
(British philosopher J.S. Mill, 1806–1873)
Summary of Choice-Supportive Bias
If you think someone is overly defending a past decision just to protect their self-esteem or trying to boost their self-esteem by exaggerating the value of a past decision, tell them they are not being objective and their actions are steeped in choice-supportive bias.Critical Thinking Test
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