When I was a child, I went to the store with enough birthday money in my pocket to buy a new game for my Nintendo. After carefully thinking about the options before me, I whittled my choice down to two video game titles: Rampage and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. After hemming and hawing until my mother was getting quite frustrated, I finally settled on Rampage.
I took the game home, played it for an hour, and hated it. I mean, hated it. For some reason, the designers of the game made the choice to give all players infinite lives, which essentially meant that you could never lose. There was no real point to the game.
Even though it was obvious I had picked up a very disappointing game, I tried to make myself believe that it was a good choice. I would make regular attempts to play it. I would coerce my friends into playing it until they begged to play anything else. I even went so far as to play the other game I considered (Castlevania II) at my cousin’s house and tell myself that the game was awful, even though I actually liked that one quite a bit.
Although this is a very extreme example, we all do some form of this at various points in our lives. We buy something. It’s not up to the standards we expected at all. Yet, we want to believe that we didn’t waste our resources, so we try to rationalize the purchase.
I have three observations about post-purchase rationalization from my own life.
It happens much more often with impulse buys than with carefully-planned purchases. Let’s roll back to that video game analogy, above. My game purchase was pretty impulsive. I didn’t have access to a wide range of reviews of the two games. In fact, I mostly made the purchase on the spur of the moment. My choice resulted from remembering a fun afternoon at an arcade with my cousin in which we played several games of Rampage together. Today, I make most of my purchases in a vastly different way. I usually research the choices into oblivion. I read reviews. I ask myself if I really need this item and, if I do, whether or not this particular item gives me adequate bang for my buck. That doesn’t mean I’m immune to impulse buys. They strike me still with …