Adults are known to make unconscious choices between things that are almost the same. But a new study by a team at Johns Hopkins University suggests that even babies engage in the same phenomenon and demonstrates that this way of justifying choice is somehow fundamental to the human experience. Even infants who are just at the start of making choices for themselves have this bias that making a choice changes how we feel about our options. It looks like they choose things that they like.
But research suggests something around. We actually like things because we choose them. And we dislike things that we did not choose. Adults make these inferences unconsciously. The team introduced 10- to 20-month-old toddlers into the lab and a choice of objects to play with was given: two equally vivid and colourful soft blocks. They set each block some distance apart, so the kids had to crawl to one of the blocks.
After the toddler chose one of the toys, the researchers took it away and gave them a new option. They could then choose from the toy they did not play with the first time or a brand new toy. The children reliably selected the option to play with the new object rather than the one they had not chosen the last time as if they have been saying, ‘I didn’t pick that object last time, hence I didn’t like it very much.
That is the core phenomenon. Adults will also like less the thing they didn’t choose, even if they had no real preference the first time. In follow-up experiments, they found that if you take the component of choice away, the phenomenon goes away. It’s really surprising.
We would never expect infants to be making such choices that are not on novelty or intrinsic preference. The team is preparing for further studies to experiment on “choice overload”, which might give very different results.
Journal Reference: Alex M. Silver, Aimee E. Stahl, Rita Loiotile, Alexis S. Smith-Flores, Lisa Feigenson. When Not Choosing Leads to Not Liking: Choice-Induced Preference in Infancy. Psychological Science, 2020; 095679762095449 DOI: 10.1177/0956797620954491
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