Do Our Choices Tell Us Who We Are? It Depends on How Easy or Difficult They Were to Make

The notion that people’s choices reveal something about who they are is fundamental to theories of self-perception, self-signaling, and preference construction, and yet, much is still unknown about the impact of the metacognitive experiences that accompany those choices. The present research explores how the relative ease or difficulty of choosing influences the extent to which consumers infer that they will make similar choices in other situations. Two experiments show that people perceive themselves to be more likely to make similar choices in other situations when their choices feel relatively easy rather than difficult to make. This is because people perceive choices to be more diagnostic of who they are when they feel relatively easy. Moreover, people consider their choices to be especially self-diagnostic when their own choice ease or difficulty differs from the ease or difficulty they expected most other people to experience. Together, these findings suggest that consumers come to understand their preferences not just from what they choose, but also from how easy or difficult those choices were to make.