> if you ask people about a movie after they’ve paid $15 for it and devoted a couple of hours of their life to it, maybe they’ll have a more favorable opinion o

> if you ask people about a movie after they’ve paid $15 for it and devoted a couple of hours of their life to it, maybe they’ll have a more favorable opinion of the work. Maybe the profoundly rightward shift in Fandango’s bell curve is just a moviegoer’s version of Stockholm syndrome. This is called the Endowment Effect[1]. I suspect it happens when you spend a considerable amount of time picking the "right" movie. Admitting to yourself that you made the wrong pick is harder than consoling yourself that it wasn't so bad after all. Often times the bias will manifest itself in the subtlest of ways--for example a survey of "How would you rate the movie you picked?" versus "How would you rate the movie?" can skew ratings positively in the case of the former. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect