Post-Purchase Rationalization
After making a purchase, we find reasons to justify why it was a good decision.
Post-purchase rationalization (or the buyer's Stockholm syndrome) is a cognitive bias whereby someone who has just made a difficult, expensive, or irrevocable decision rationalizes it as having been a good choice by selectively interpreting evidence. It is part of the broader phenomenon of cognitive dissonance reduction — we cannot live with the discomfort of having made a bad choice, so we reconstruct our memory of the decision.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Everyday life Expensive Purchase Defense Buyers of expensive cars consistently rate their new car's performance and value higher post-purchase than pre-purchase.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
After buying a house in a competitive market, Ryan begins to emphasize the good school district and quiet street more than he did before the purchase.
After purchasing a product through a high-pressure sales pitch, a buyer convinces themselves they wanted it all along, even though the decision was made under duress and the product does not genuinely meet any immediate need or want they had before the sales encounter.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
Get Debias on Google Play