Are You Always in the Slow Lane?

Part of the reason I am so intrigued by consumer psychology is that I see its effects first-hand on my behavior. I am more susceptible to these influences than most. We are constantly affected by how we process information and how we use what is readily available and fail to account for unavailable information when we make our choices. That sounds rather vague.

Have you ever felt that the grocery store line you join always seems to slow down. Why is it, that the moment you join a line, the other lines start moving faster while you get caught in the one line with a price check?

First, try this card trick out and see if you can figure out how it's done. If you tell me you figured it out immediately, you're either very smart, a psychologist, or a liar. Do you see how this card trick relates to your grocery store experience? Well, the underlying psychological process is the same. We tend to remember certain parts of an experience and forget others. When we later make a decision, we tend to "overweight" the remembered information. So, when you think of all your grocery store lines, you just happen to remember all the times you got stuck in a line and forget all the other times you sailed right through. So, it appears to you that you're always in a slow line. An empirical evaluation of all your grocery store line experiences will show that you often don't get stuck in the slow lane. Now can you figure out the card trick? What do you focus on and what information do you ignore?

This problem of selectively remembering only "special" or salient events can affect everything from business decision making to personal relationships. You may start to feel your spouse is always cutting you down in public, or that he never puts the toilet seat down. This frustrates the spouse because as far as he remembers, he always puts the seat down ... you get my drift. Of course, there are many more significant implications to this basic psychological process, but this is good enough for one post.