At the end of a long week, we often order takeout food from
a local restaurant rather than cooking.
There are a lot of restaurants in Austin, and many of them serve really
excellent food. Yet, we tend to order
from the same small list of places.
There are better restaurants, but by the time we get down to ordering,
we are most interested in doing what is easiest. The places we normally pick are within a few
minutes’ drive of the house.
This example rests on two factors that influence a lot of
our choices: desirability and feasibility. Desirability is how much we want a particular
option. Feasibility reflects how easy it
is to get that option or how likely we are to succeed if we make a particular
choice.
An interesting paper by Jingyi Lu, Xiaofei Xie, and Jingzhe
Xu in the February, 2013 issue of Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin explored how we trade off between these
concerns. They suggest that people pay
more attention to feasibility information when making a choice for themselves
than when making a choice for someone else.
In previous blog entries, I have talked about an observation
that came from research by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman that we tend to think
about things more specifically when they are psychologically nearer to us than
when they are psychologically distant.
In the case of decisions, making a choice for yourself puts you
psychologically closer to that choice than making a choice for someone
else. When you think specifically about
a choice, you generally focus on the specific circumstance you are in. So, you are concerned about whether the
option is feasible. When you think generally abstractly about a choice, you
focus on more general concerns like whether the option is going to be
enjoyable.
To test this proposal, the researchers did several studies.
In one experiment, college students could choose to purchase coupons for
restaurants. Some participants selected
restaurants for themselves, while others were asked how much a typical student
would be willing to pay for these coupons.
One restaurant was described as having excellent food and being very
popular, but also being far away and often crowded so that there is a wait to
get a table. The other was described as
having decent food, but being close by without long waits to get a table. When choosing for themselves, people were
willing to pay more for the nearby restaurant than for the restaurant with good
food. When choosing for a typical other person,
people were willing to pay more for the restaurant with good food than for the
restaurant that was close by.
A second study examined the kind of information people seek
when making choices. In this experiment,
the materials were descriptions of classes.
People were asked to choose a course either for themselves or for a
typical student. Each option was
described by 10 features. Five of those
were related to how desirable a class was likely to be (like how interesting it
is or how much depth it covers). Five
were related to how easy it would be to complete the class successfully (like
passing rate and difficulty of the assignments). People had to select which five features they
wanted to see. Participants choosing for
themselves were more likely to select information about how easy the class
would be to complete than people who were choosing for a typical student.
A third set of studies had people make choices and then
later asked them what they remembered about the options. In this study, people making choices for someone
else remembered more about how desirable the options were than those who were
making choices for themselves.
Putting all of this together, we treat choices differently
depending on whether we are making a decision for ourselves or for someone
else. When we choose for ourselves, we
are mentally nearer to the decision than when we are choosing for someone
else. As a result, when choosing for ourselves, we
focus on information that is related to the ease of the options, but when
choosing for someone else we focus on the desirability of the options.
If you find yourself opting for the easy choice, then, you
can get yourself out of that rut by imagining what someone else would do in the
same situation. That can get you to think
more about picking will be most enjoyable for you.
