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the good life in a digital age

changing your mind

More lovely stuff from the Edge Question

Daniel Gilbert, of Stumbling on Happiness fame changed his mind about changing your mind

people are generally happier with decisions when they can’t undo them. When subjects in our experiments were able to undo their decisions they tended to consider both the positive and negative features of the decisions they had made, but when they couldn’t undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. As such, they were more satisfied when they made irrevocable than revocable decisions. Ironically, subjects did not realize this would happen and strongly preferred to have the opportunity to change their minds”

Written by Karen

January 5th, 2008 at 2:17 pm

Posted in psychology