Delay, Doubt, and Decision : How Delaying a Choice Reduces the Appeal of Options

Original source: SimoleonSense.com .

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Abstract (via Vande Ven, Gilovich, Zeelenberg @ APS)

To help explain a regularity in democratic elections, we examined whether choosing to delay making a choice between a focal option and an alternative tends to make people subsequently less likely to choose what they would otherwise have chosen. The results of two experiments demonstrated that participants who were induced to delay making a decision were indeed less likely to choose the descriptively normative option. An additional experiment that primed a sense of doubt in participants provided support for a self-perception account of this result. Electing to delay making a choice is interpreted as an indication of doubt—doubt that tends to be attributed to the most prominent option. Delay-induced doubt about the normative option makes it less likely to be selected.

Introduction (via Vande Ven, Gilovich, Zeelenberg @ APS)

Political junkies are familiar with a regularity in U.S elections that is likely to seem odd to most psychologists. This regularity is known as the incumbent rule, and it refers to the fact that undecided voters who end up casting ballots tend to vote against the incumbent. One analysis found that in 127 of 155 national, state, and municipal elections, the majority of undecided voters went for the challenger (Panagakis, 1989). The incumbent rule can seem odd to a psychologist because of research findings that might lead one to expect the opposite result. That is, decision researchers have documented a status quo bias in people’s choices—a bias to stick with the status quo option rather than try something new (Ritov & Baron, 1992; Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988). The incumbent is by definition the status quo candidate, so why do undecided voters not favor the incumbent?

One possibility is that the status quo bias exerts itself before the eve of the election, and at that point the remaining undecided voters are people who cannot quite get themselves to favor the incumbent despite this bias. Undecided voters, in other words, may be mainly undecided about—that is, have reservations about—the incumbent (Panagakis, 1989). Thus, when the time comes for these voters to cast their ballots, the doubts they harbor about the incumbent exert themselves, resulting in a tendency to vote for the challenger.

We propose a variant of this explanation and examine its broader implications. We contend that undecided voters interpret the fact that they have yet to decide as information that calls into question the wisdom of picking the incumbent. Given that the incumbent is typically the more psychologically prominent candidate, and that people know they often follow an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule, they may wonder why they have not already resolved to vote for the incumbent (“If the incumbent is so great, why am I having reservations about my vote?”). In other words, we proposethat the experience of doubt is experienced as doubt about the incumbent.

Click Here To Read: Delay, Doubt, and Decision : How Delaying a Choice Reduces the Appeal of Options