Source: Peter Mende-Siedlecki & Jay Van Bavel-New York University When we are considering a tough choice between two or more attractive options, we often end up actively weighing the pros and cons of each alternative. By reflecting on their advantages and disadvantages, we attempt to fit a complex, subjective decision into an orderly set of criteria. However, research in psychology suggests that this sort of introspective approach might not always yield the most optimal outcomes.1 In other words, sometimes thinking hard about a problem or a choice may not produce desired results. Similar results have been demonstrated in the domains of emotion (participants who ruminated about a bad mood showed less mood improvement than participants who were merely distracted from their mood;2 and memory (verbalizing the details of a criminal's face led to poorer recognition in a photo array of possible suspects.3 Furthermore, Wilson and colleagues observed that reflecting on the reasons behind one's attitudes (i.e., considering "why" one feels a certain way) can disrupt the consistency between attitudes and behavior, and can even change attitudes.4 Why might this be the case? Wilson and colleagues speculate that often we don't typically have a very good understanding of why we actually feel the way we do.5 Upon introspection of our feelings, we may hone in on irrelevant but salient details that may offer plausible explanations, but may also have little direct influence on our actual attitudes. Wilson and Schooler devised an experiment designed to test this possibility in the domain of subjective preferences. Specifically, they compared participants' evaluations of a series of jams with experts' evaluations, and tested whether asking participants to analyze the reasons for their choices would have a negative impact on their evaluations.