There are two broad strategies
that people use to make choices. One
method is to compare the options to each other and choose the best one. The other is to evaluate each option
individually and then pick the one that is rated as the best.
These strategies are used in
different circumstances. In his book, Sources of Power, Gary Klein suggests
that experts are more likely to evaluate the options individually, while people
with less expertise tend to compare the options.
One reason why comparison helps
novices more than experts comes from research by Chris Hsee. This work shows that it is easier for people
to evaluate the options when they are being compared. Imagine buying a new dictionary. You find out that a particular dictionary has
50,000 entries in it. Is that good or
bad? If you are a dictionary expert, the
you might know whether that is a large number of entries. Suppose, though, that you find out that
another dictionary only has 25,000 entries in it. Now, you know that 50,000 entries is a good
number for a dictionary to have.
A 2012 paper by Thomas Mussweiler
and Ann-Chrstin Posten in Cognition
demonstrates that when people compare options, they also get more confident in
their judgments.
To get participants in their
studies in a mindset to make comparisons, they had people look at a complex
picture and write down the commonalities and differences between two halves of
the picture. Other participants
evaluated the picture without making comparisons. Previous work by these researchers shows that
this technique reliably gets people to make comparisons in later tasks.
In one study, after looking at the
complex picture, participants were shown descriptions of three brands of cell
phones (labeled Brands A, B, and C).
They had a chance to study the descriptions. Later, they were shown fourteen of the
features they had seen and were asked whether those features belonged to Brand
B. With each response, participants were
allowed to place a bet between 0 and 10 Euros (the study was done in Germany) based
on how confident they were in their response.
The higher the bet, the more confident that people were that they knew
whether the feature belonged to Brand B.
People who were put in a mindset
to make comparisons were more confident in their judgments about the features
of the cell phones than people who did not make comparisons. Despite the difference in confidence, the
people who made comparisons were not more accurate in their judgments than
those who did not make comparisons.
This confidence can also affect
the choices people make. In another
study, participants were shown the menu from the university cafeteria before
lunch. They were asked to select the
item from the cafeteria they thought they would want to eat. As before, some participants were put in a
mindset to make comparisons while others were not. After lunch, participants were asked what
they actually ate. Those who made
comparisons ate what they predicted they would eat about 75 percent of the time,
while those who did not make comparisons at what they predicted they would eat
about 50% of the time. (Because there
were about 10 items on the menu, chance would be about 10%.)
Putting all this research
together, it suggests that when you don’t have a lot of expertise in a domain,
you need to be careful when making decisions.
On the one hand, you are quite likely to rely on comparing the options
in order to make a choice. On the other
hand, those comparisons will increase your feeling of confidence in the
decision. So, you need to recognize that
at least part of that confidence comes from the way the choice was made.
