Ask: “Would I choose this today if I were starting fresh?”

Evaluate your current situation as if you were encountering it for the first time, without sunk costs.

Why it works

Familiarity inflates preference independently of actual value — mere exposure increases liking even without new positive information. The “starting fresh” question strips away familiarity effects and sunk cost attachment to isolate whether the current situation would be chosen on its merits. If the answer is clearly “no, I wouldn’t choose this today,” the gap between that answer and your actual behavior is the bias in action.

How to do it

1. Describe your current situation to yourself as if explaining it to a stranger who has no history with it.
2. Ask: “If I were a new person encountering this job / relationship / routine for the first time today, would I choose to enter it?”
3. If the answer is no, ask what is keeping you there beyond the switching cost.
4. Distinguish sunk costs and familiarity from genuine reasons to stay.

Evidence

Mere exposure effects (Zajonc, 1968) and sunk cost fallacy research both contribute to the status quo preference independently of actual option quality. The “starting fresh” question is a practitioner technique for isolating these effects, mechanistically grounded but not directly trialed. (mechanistic)

The fresh-eyes test can overcorrect by stripping out legitimate reasons that are hard to articulate — experience and history have real value that isn’t captured in a clean first-impression framing.

Sources

• Zajonc (1968), Attitudinal effects of mere exposure, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Common mistake

Asking “would I choose this if starting fresh?” but then immediately supplying all the context that makes it feel better — the question requires genuinely stripping the familiarity, not just performing it.