Cognitive Dissonance and the Ducati: A Case Study in Buyer’s Remorse

We are all familiar with the general concept surrounding cognitive dissonance, whether we have formally studied it or not.  It is the idea that you change your perceptions and beliefs based on the details surrounding a situation.  This is most fundamentally portrayed in Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes.”  In this story the fox desires grapes that are hanging from a high branch but cannot figure out any way to get to the fruit.  He gives up and comes to the false conclusion that the grapes must be sour, anyways.¹  Conversely, we often have the tendency to do this in the opposite direction; proclaiming something is wonderful when in fact it is not.

Let’s take for example the case of the Ducati.  On the hunt for a new motorcycle, I come across a 1993 Ducati Desmondue Super Sport 900.  Beautiful bike, good condition, low mileage, never been dumped, and the price is right!  I take it for a test drive and it runs great!  Nice acceleration, good power, excellent handling, and the exhaust is rich and guttural from an aftermarket set of Ferraci pipes.   No more than a month after purchasing the bike, I start to have problems.  The battery dies, the solenoid melts, the starter switch goes out, and now there is a funny noise coming from the engine.  6 months and a lot of money later the bike is running again (you can imagine the new price point no longer being right).

Now all of this is recapped to emphasize cognitive dissonance: if you asked me about the bike, I would tell you nothing but great things.  “It runs great!  It looks good!  It was the best purchase ever!”  We all know this is not true considering the winter’s worth of mechanical heartache.   But we have to keep telling ourselves these things in order to avoid the potential depression associated with admitting the truth when we make an awful purchase. 

Cognitive dissonance ties nicely in to another form of buyer behavior that we all know as buyer’s remorse.  This is the precept that when we make an expensive purchase, afterwards we are remorseful that we may have made the wrong purchase.  Thoughts run through our mind like, “I should have gotten the red one!” or “I should have gone with Harley; not the Ducati!”  In some cases this threat of remorse hinders us to the point that we never make the purchase at all.  It is with just this that I had an experience at the mall this past summer.

I stop in the Sunglass Hut and begin pursuing the Oakleys for a new pair.  The sales woman walks up and asks about the ones I am currently wearing and how long I have had them.  I tell her I have had them since 2005 and they are the “minute” style.  To this she replies, “They don’t even make those anymore.”  I laugh, pick up a pair, and try them on.  Immediately she tells me that they look great and that I should get them (and this is after I just told her that the pair I am wearing, I have had for 6 years – I am obviously not an impulse buyer).  I do not buy them and walk away with no new glasses, continuing to squint through my old pair, for fear that I am going to get home and wish I had selected another: buyer’s remorse.

So what is the moral – what’s the take-away regarding buyer behavior?  I don’t know.   I still have not learned my lesson.  Sometimes I buy things that I know I shouldn’t (like a 20 year old Italian motorcycle known for being finicky but which by way of cognitive dissonance I will speak of in no manner other than the highest regards) and sometimes I cannot even commit to a new pair of sunglasses even when the ones I am wearing are scratched and worn out (fearful of the remorse I might feel when I see a cooler pair on someone else).  Ideas…?  Help…?

Jon Wilson

¹ Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge 1983, p. 123ff.