Your Brain Is a Defence Lawyer
Why watch debates are never about watches, and what that tells you about yourself
Anyone who has embraced the watch nerd label will, at some point, have read or participated in an online debate about watches. You can click that link and observe grown adults typing out dissertations, writing with the fervour of someone defending their country’s honour at the United Nations. One person will argue that Rolex’s Superlative Chronometer testing is superior to METAS certification, only for someone else to offer up a thousand-word rebuttal, with amplitude data no less. This is the psychological equivalent of two bald guys fighting over a comb.
Which made me wonder: why does anyone bother getting defensive over watches?
Estimated reading time: ~ 18 minutes
Pringles flavours
To understand the absurdity of watch forum warfare, I figured we could ‘start simple’ by thinking about how we handle normal differences in regular taste - and I mean taste quite literally here.
If your mate prefers Pringles BBQ crisps and you’re a salt-and-vinegar person, nobody loses sleep over it. You might give each other a bit of stick depending on who does the shopping for your road trip, but you basically just… move on. The human brain is actually very good at accepting such benign differences in preference. Neither choice is ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and both of you understand this instinctively.
When you scale that preference up the hierarchy of social, cultural, and financial investment, this is when tolerance goes out of the window. If you find yourself at Wolfgang Puck’s steak restaurant in Mayfair (very good btw), and order a steak well-done instead of medium-rare, I’m pretty sure everyone at the table will judge you… just like people will judge you if you turn up wearing a Hublot, well, anywhere. These are still just preferences - the same as Pringles - but they happen to carry ‘social weight’ now. What I mean by this, is that your choice becomes a proxy for your taste, your intelligence, and your identity.
In the world of watches, this dynamic reaches a fever pitch; a person might have a deep, inexplicable preference for an Omega over a Rolex (or the other way around), and the truth of the matter is that people simply like what they like. Attraction, be it in romantic love or indeed in watches, is inherently subjective… and yet, the debates are endless, sometimes vitriolic, but more often than not… fiercely defensive.
To understand this in more detail, we need to dig into how your brain makes choices.
By the way… the irony that I’m about to construct an elaborate (albeit research-backed) argument about why people construct elaborate arguments, is not lost on me 😂 - consider me Exhibit A if you must.
You decide before you start thinking
We all love to think of ourselves as highly rational connoisseurs. We might look at spec sheets, compare power reserves, examine finishing, determine what is ‘good value’, and then decide which watch is best for us... right?
Wrong.
Modern psychology has actually unraveled this assumption. Human beings operate on a principle that researchers call ‘affective primacy’ i.e. the emotional reaction to an object happens instantaneously, and often before your conscious mind has even started processing. Your preference for a particular brand is rarely the result of some dispassionate technical analysis and it almost certainly has roots buried far deeper than that.1
A specific dial colour might trigger a subconscious memory of a formative childhood holiday. A particular brand might carry emotional weight because your father or grandfather wore one. A case shape might evoke something comforting that you can’t quite articulate. You simply ‘know’ you prefer one watch over another because you experience a kind of visceral sense of rightness when you look at it.
The problem is that we suffer from something which psychologists call the ‘introspection illusion.’ When someone asks you why you prefer a particular watch, you have no conscious ‘instant recall’ to the emotional or historical variables that actually shaped the preference you have today. You can’t say “Oh I bought this watch because its shade of blue reminds me of my favourite blanket as a child” because you don’t even know that’s the case. Your brain hasn’t given you access to that information explicitly.
So what are you supposed to do? You now have an explanatory void, and to fill this void (i.e. to maintain your self-concept as a rational decision-maker) you convince yourself that “logic” must be the answer… so you start talking about movements or whatever other sh1t you need to talk about, to convince yourself that you have rational beliefs.2
Pivot to merit
Now let’s talk about post-hoc rationalisation - another well-documented psychological defence mechanism. The sequence is always the same, where you make a decision intuitively, and then you build a logical justification for it after the fact, both for your own peace of mind and to defend the choice against critics.
In the Rolex versus Omega context, this plays out fairly often, and you’ll recognise it immediately. The Omega person might aggressively assert that the Co-Axial escapement and METAS Master Chronometer certification render their watch anti-magnetic to 15,000 gauss, and that this stuff constitutes ‘objective superiority’. The Rolex person counters that Rolex’s Superlative Chronometer standard has stricter internal tolerances, that the movements are historically more reliable, and that 904L steel is better than 316L.
Both parties then plunge into highly specialised debates about isochronism and amplitude that neither is typically qualified to have. Or they may just turn to market prices and point out how the secondary market price ‘proves’ one is better than the other. The fatal flaw in all of it is that ‘better’ simply isn’t quantifiable here. Both watches tell time with a degree of mechanical accuracy that exceeds daily necessity, and neither is as accurate as a cheap quartz Casio. If one person just enjoys wearing the Omega more than the Rolex (or vice versa), the other person cannot possibly prove them wrong. In other words, this whole debate is just a performance, not a pursuit of truth.
What makes this insidious is a related phenomenon called choice-induced preference change (CIPC). Decades of research findings have shown that people report significantly higher subjective valuations for items after having selected them. fMRI studies have revealed that this isn’t just ‘social performance’; the act of making a difficult decision triggers rapid emotion-regulation processes in the brain, and this literally alters how you encode subjective value - i.e. your brain rewrites its own assessment to justify what you already chose.3
So when someone tells you that your watch is overpriced or technically inferior, your brain registers this as “someone poking a hole in a justification that your brain has worked very hard to construct” - it’s not just “someone challenging your preferences.”
With this reframing, it’s much easier to see why people can be triggered so easily.
By the way… none of this implies that technical differences don’t exist or don’t matter. A Co-Axial escapement is, objectively, an innovative achievement in watchmaking. Movement finishing does vary enormously across price points. Technical knowledge absolutely is valuable and worth developing. The underlying issue is not ‘the fact that people discuss technical merits’; the issue arises when technical arguments become a disguise for emotional preferences that the person can’t or won’t acknowledge. There’s a difference between “I appreciate the innovation in a Co-Axial escapement” and “anyone who buys a Rolex over an Omega is dumb, because METAS.” The first is legit enthusiasm, and the second is your internal lawyer talking.