Decisions, Decisions

The task: Press some buttons!

Let's say we invite you to the lab and let you rate how much you like certain snack food items. Doritos, Snickers, M&Ms... and the like. You like M&M's as much as Snickers, you don't really have a preference. But you do like snack foods in general, and you are starving because we just let you fast for four hours.

You do a little task, quite simple. We show you all kinds of snack food items and ask you to press a button whenever you see an item that is associated with a beep (training phase). Press it quickly, before the item disappears from the screen again. Do this for a couple of rounds.

Then, as you might guess, we let you choose between two snack food items at a time. When you came in, you liked them both to the same extent. Now, one of the items you see at once was always associated with a beep (e.g. you choose between those M&M’s and a Snickers bar, while Snickers was associated with a beep while M&M's weren't).

The outcome: Preferences changed!

Result? Suddenly you are not indifferent between the two items anymore, but you end up choosing Snickers way over chance rate (around .65, and the effect sometimes lasts for two months). Note that this was done without hitting you on the head every time you chose M&M's (i.e. without negative external reinforcement because it is likely that you would unlearn this behavior when being punished every time you engage in it), or without telling you about how great of a job you did every time you chose M&M’s (i.e. positive reinforcement).  You simply chose for later consumption (which item do you like more?)- and you are hungry, of course.

The question arising from these experiments is how values are placed on certain goods, and how our valuations can change through automatic, most likely unconscious mechanisms (only some participants were aware of some items always being associated with a beep during training). The mechanisms underlying this effect on later choice are not yet fully understood, but follow-up studies show that the effects are not only mechanistic reflexes nor are they related to mere-exposure effects (that is, you simply like an item more because you look at it more, you have been “exposed” to it longer- you might have experienced it when suddenly humming along to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” just because you've heard it too often).

As always, handle results with care. This is far from making you choose anything you don’t want in a supermarket or even trying to make you choose an apple over a Snickers bar in a supermarket. As long as you do not have any inherent goal, say to alleviate hunger or to eat healthily, it will be hard to influence choices in a systematic manner (and that's a good thing, of course!). But I’ve mentioned Snickers so often in this article, that you might go ahead and treat yourself to some… Snickers soon? Snickers. Snickers.

The science behind:

Schonberg, T., Bakkour, A., Hover, A. M., Mumford, J. A., Nagar, L., Perez, J., & Poldrack, R. A. (2014). Changing value through cued approach: an automatic mechanism of behavior change. Nature Neuroscience, 17(4), 625–630. doi:10.1038/nn.3673

More choice is better... in some sense. 

Starbucks is able to serve you a coffee in more than 19000 ways worldwide. 19000 options are great. By default, as the number of options increases, it is more likely that our most valued  alternative will be part of the choice set, too (Scheibehenne et al., 2010).

When choice becomes too much choice

Likely, you won’t compare all 19000 options, but eventually choose one of the damn coffees. How would you feel if you end up with a coffee much too sweet for your taste, after having paid a relatively high price for it? It is easily imaginable that among the 18999 other choices you had when the barista asked for your order, there would have been a coffee more suitable to your preferences.

Especially in situations where choices are abundant, people tend to believe that unacceptable outcomes are their own fault. As an old saying goes, ‘every man is the architect of his own fortune’. By such mantras, we easily conclude that it should have been possible to pick a satisfactory option. Schwartz (2000) argues that most of us strive for self-determination, thus maximizing their very own preferences, “keeping in with the principles of rational choice”. If we fail to do so, this is seen as a personal mistake.

How we deal with too many options

Sometimes, we avoid choosing at all. In a study by Iyengar and Lepper (2002), consumers were more likely to leave a supermarket emptyhanded when faced with 24 types of jam, instead of only six. Researchers termed the paralysis arising from an abundance of choice the “too-much-choice effect”, or the “paradox of choice” (Schwartz, 2000).

But what if I wanted to buy jam nevertheless?

Choose a ‘good enough’ option (people who generally tend to act this way are called “Satisficers”) and move on. If you’ve bought a coffee you really don’t enjoy that much don’t continue drinking it, even if you’ve invested money in it. Economists call this money a 'sunk cost'. In that situation, not drinking anything might be better than drinking something that doesn’t taste good, wouldn't it? Don’t give in to sunk costs!

  The science behind:

Jessup, R. K., Veinott, E. S., Todd, P. M., & Busemeyer, J. R. (2009). Leaving the store empty-handed: Testing explanations for the too-much-choice effect using decision field theory. Psychology and Marketing, 26(3), 299-320.

Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R. & Todd, P.M. (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (3), 409–425.

Schwartz, B. (2000). Self-Determination: The Tyranny of Freedom. American Psychologist, 55(1), 79-88.