How Buying Tomato Soup Is Like A Midlife Crisis

Are people wired to think they can do "better" than their current choices? New research says:

... when consumers expect to make similar choices in the future, they selectively pay attention to information that suggests that an alternative would be better. These consumers also tend to disregard information that indicates their current choice is the best possible choice.

Admittedly, the researchers were looking at shopping behavior ... but marriage, career, and other aspects of life's path are in some sense also a matter of weighing one's choices. And people don't always make the best decisions:

"... consumers overestimate how green the grass is on the other side of the fence, leading them to abandon their chosen store for an often objectively inferior alternative."

Substitute "spouse" for "store" and you'll see why I think this marketing study carries over to larger decisions. You only have to read the discussion posts here at LifeTwo to find stories of people leaving good relationships looking for what they thought would be better ones ... how many of those were caused by a built-in grass-is-greener drive?

There are some problems with this analogy, the most obvious being that making decisions about marriage or career is quite different that deciding which store to shop at. Another is that the researchers compared a group who got one chance to go on a shopping trip to another group who knew they'd get a second go-around. In life, you can never be sure about getting that second chance. Lastly, the consumers were getting mixed feedback about their choices -- not entirely positive or negative. Here we'd argue that the metaphor is stronger, for aside from a few perfect marriages, "mixed feedback" probably describes most midlife relationships.

But in general, isn't it possible that people are predisposed to think that if they had another chance -- at whatever -- they could do better? Even economists now admit that people don't always act rationally. Our brains are wired with biases -- against outsiders, against losing what we have, toward incidents that confirm what we 'know' -- and this may just be one more.

The authors can only guess at the psychology underlying the results, but what they say makes sense:

"Our findings suggest that consumers who are focused on the future are so preoccupied with finding ways to improve their situation that they become overly sensitive to information that points to such opportunities -- and lose sight of the relative advantages of their current choice."

In LifeTwo's arena, the practical application of this is de-romanticizing change for change's sake. If you know someone thinking about making significant changes in their life, help them refocus on what they have, and the negatives of giving it up. We've written before about research showing that unhappily married adults stayed unhappy whether or not they got a divorce. Were those divorces necessary? Or was the person initiating the divorce driven by a faulty belief that they'd be better off?

There is no doubt that in life, as in choosing what soup to buy, the grass really is sometimes greener on the other side of the fence. But sometimes it's just your built-in biases making it look that way.

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You can download the paper here.