Kusum Gupta (1)
Nostalgia—the sentimental longing for a personally meaningful past—has increasingly been recognized as a powerful cognitive force that extends well beyond emotional experience into consequential decision-making. This paper introduces and theorizes the Nostalgia Bias, a systematic cognitive distortion whereby individuals overweight the hedonic value of past experiences relative to their objective utility, resulting in a preference for choices that reconstruct familiar historical contexts over objectively superior future alternatives. Drawing on dual-process theory (Kahneman, 2011), autobiographical memory research (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), and prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), this paper develops a conceptual framework that maps the pathway from idealized memory encoding through nostalgic activation to suboptimal forward-looking choices. Simulated decision-quality data, cross-domain valuation analyses, and theoretical moderation pathways involving temporal self-continuity and opportunity cost neglect are presented. The framework is visualized through three original figures. Findings suggest that the Nostalgia Bias operates with notable strength in career transitions, relational re-engagement, financial re-investment, and geographic re-location decisions. This work calls for targeted debiasing interventions calibrated to nostalgia intensity and domain type.
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