SE #3 Rhetorical Theory Revised – Choice Supportive Bias
The theory that I chose is the choice supportive bias. The theory is used to look back at
your choices and attribute them with positives so that they sound like the best possible
choice. People find the negatives in the choices that they didn’t make to justify that their
choice was the most beneficial choice.
The components of the theory are you first need to have made a choice where you sacrifice
one thing for another, such as watching television over eating ice cream, and then look
back at the choice you made. People will look positively at their choice and begin to think
that their choice was the better choice of the two. For example, the person who chose
television over ice cream would say that they learned about the world by watching the
news and they didn’t gain weight by eating the ice cream. People distort their memories so
that the choice that they chose appears to be the best. For example, someone might say that
the car that they bought was a lot better than they were hoping for because it has additional
add-ons that make the car more valuable than it is actually worth. By thinking that we
made the right choice, we make ourselves feel good and will be more likely to make other
choices. Unfortunately, those choices might not be the best ones, but we would still try to
find the positives and make it appear that the choice that we made was the right choice to
