Consumers are frequently put in positions in which they would benefit from remembering their past product decisions. Yet how
well do consumers remember the choices they have made, and is memory influenced by the difficulty of the decision? In Study
1, 403 participants were presented with pairs of products in an online survey and were asked to indicate which product of each
pair they would rather buy. After completing a distraction task, participants were then tested for how well they could recall their
previous decisions. As hypothesized, recall was worse for decisions that, according to a pretest, were more difficult to make.
These results persisted after controlling for the type of product (i.e., shampoos, water bottles, salad dressings, and mugs). In
Study 2, we examined a possible alternative explanation that these results were found only because participants selected the
items they liked as opposed to actually remembering which items they had previously chosen. In this follow-up study, 301
participants made decisions between pairs of unpleasant items (i.e., bad- tasting jelly beans). All of these were disliked, and
therefore participants could not simply select the items they liked. As hypothesized, among these disliked pairs, recall was again
worse for decisions that were more difficult to make. Potential underlying mechanisms for these results are discussed.