I generally try to speed through
the grocery store when I’m doing the shopping.
I want to get everything on my list, but I would really rather be
somewhere else.
I do like to watch other people
shopping, though. I guess it is an
occupational hazard. And every once in a
while, I find someone standing in front of a wall of tomato sauce, conditioner,
or baked beans trying to figure out which one to buy. In the grand scheme of things, that
particular choice is probably not that important, yet someone can spend a few
minutes contemplating the benefits of one brand over another. If you asked shoppers whether it was worth
spending so much time choosing that product, they would probably say no, yet
they do it anyhow.
Why?
This issue was addressed in a
paper in the August 2012 issue of the Journal
of Consumer Research by Aner Sela and Jonah Berger.
They suggest that unimportant
decisions can suck us in when they are more difficult than we expect them to
be. They call these choices decision quicksand, because they pull
you in and take more effort than they deserve.
In one experiment, they used
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Mechanical
Turk is a marketplace where people can do simple questionnaires and other tasks
and get paid to do them. Many
researchers have taken to using this site to collect data.
They gave people the opportunity
to select a task to perform some time in the future. The task was described by simple features
like whether it was going to be fun or boring, how much time it would take, and
how much they would be paid. Half the
people were told that their selection was binding, so the decision was
important, while the other half were told that they could switch tasks later,
so their decision was not that important.
Some people were given an easy
choice between one option that was going to be fun, fast, and would pay well
and another that was going to be boring, slow, and low-paying. The people given the easy choice made a quick
decision regardless of whether they were given the binding or non-binding
versions of the choice.
Other people were given a harder
decision task in which all of the tasks had both good and bad
characteristics. In this case, the
people who were making the binding choice made a fairly quick decision, but
those who were making the non-binding choice actually took almost twice as long
to choose. That is, the people with the
less important version of the choice actually took more time to make the hard decision
than those with the more important decision to make.
A second experiment in this paper
found that unimportant choices that were unexpectedly difficult led people to
seek more information. In this study,
people were told to imagine that they had to choose a flight for a business
trip. The flight was either a short and
easy flight or a long and tiring one.
The task was made easy or hard by varying how hard it was to read the
information about the flights. In the
easy version of the task, the options were written in a clear font. In the hard version of the task, the options
were written in low contrast so that they were difficult to read.
After seeing an initial set of
options, people were asked if they wanted to choose from among the set they saw
or whether they wanted to see more options.
People who got the easy-to-read versions of the options were equally
likely to want to see more options regardless of whether they were making a
choice for a short or a long flight.
People who got the options that were hard-to-read were more likely to
want to see additional options when choosing a short flight than when choosing
a long flight. That is, they requested
more information for the less important choice.
What is going on here?
When we make choices, we have to
trade off between effort and accuracy. So, we ought to spend the most time on the
most important choices in an effort to make sure we get the best option in that
case.
But, how do we know how much time
we should spend on a choice? At the
beginning, we make an estimate of how easy the choice is going to be. When we expect a choice to be hard and it is,
then we are likely to focus just on the options and not on the difficulty of
the decision. But, when we expect the
choice to be easy and it turns out to be hard, then we are surprised by that
difficulty. We naturally respond to that
unexpected difficulty with more effort, even though that additional effort
really is not necessary. That response
reflects that a little extra effort often allows us to solve the problems we
encounter in daily life.
So, what can you do? When you go to the grocery store—or anywhere
else where you don’t really need to make a very accurate decision—keep your
focus on reaching a decision. Take a
moment to short-circuit your desire to keep working on decisions that don’t
matter very much and save your effort for the choices that are really
important.
