We tend to think of conflict as
the enemy of good decision making. We
dread situations that involve difficult choices. Indeed, studies by Amos Tversky, Eldar
Shafir, Ravi Dhar, Itamar Simonson and their colleagues suggests that people
will actually avoid making decisions that are difficult. When given a choice between selecting one of
two options that require making a difficult tradeoff (for example, selecting
apartments that differ in size and commute time), people prefer to put the
decision off until later rather than addressing it right away.
An interesting paper by Jennifer
Savary, Tali Kleiman, Ran Hassin, and Ravi Dhar in the February, 2015 issue of
the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General suggests that there may also be an upside to experiencing
conflict. Specifically, they suggest that when people have two conflicting
goals that they are grappling with, that makes them likely to think carefully
about choices in order to resolve the conflict.
In order to induce conflicting
goals, participants did a lexical decision task in which they saw a series of
letters and had to press one button of those letters formed a word and a second
button if they did not form a word. In
the conflict condition, some of the words referred to a particular goal (such
as being healthy, with words like fitness
and active), and others referred to a
second goal that conflicts with the first (such as indulgence, with words like decadent and indulge). The control
condition did not have conflicting goals embedded in the words that were part
of the lexical decision task. Tasks like
this have been used in many previous studies to activate goals and to create
goal conflict.
After this lexical decision task,
one study gave people difficult choices (like a choice between apartments that
differ in size and commute time) and asked people to select one of the options
or to defer the choice until later. Participants
who were induced to feel a conflict between goals were actually more likely to
choose one of the options rather than deferring the choice than people in the
control condition who were not given a goal conflict.
In a second study, participants
were given these choices using a computer system that tracked the amount of
time participants spent making the decision and the number of features of the
options they explored. Participants
induced to experience a conflict looked at more features and spent more time
making the choices than those who did not experience a conflict. This study also demonstrated that people were
not aware of the goal conflict that was induced.
One other study tested the idea
that conflicting goals increase how thoroughly people process information about
choices in a slightly different way.
Again, goal conflict was induced using the lexical decision task. This time, though. The decision task involves
selecting from among three options (say three different apartments). One was very good on one dimension (it was
large), but very bad on the other (it was far from work). A second was bad on that first dimension (it
was small), but good on the other (it was close to work). A third was a compromise (medium in size, a
moderate commute to work).
Previous research suggest that
when people don’t want to work that hard making a choice, they tend to select
the compromise option so that they don’t need to figure out which dimension is
more important to them. If people really
think carefully about the choice, then, they will be more likely to pick one of
the extreme options rather than the compromise.
Consistent with the other two
studies, participants induced to have a goal conflict were more likely to pick
one of the extreme options than people in the control condition who had no goal
conflict.
An interesting aspect of these
studies is that the goal conflict that was induced was not directly related to
the choices people were making. So, the
increase in depth of thought about the choices was caused by the presence of
active goals that conflict, and not based on the activity of goals that were
relevant to evaluating the options.
This research suggests that we
experience two kinds of conflicts when making choices. One conflict is between options that are
about equally attractive and require tradeoffs among the features to figure out
which is best. These conflicts make it
hard for people to choose. Often, people
prefer to defer the choice until later or pick an easy compromise option rather
than resolving tradeoffs.
The second kind of conflict is one
between incompatible goals. These goal
conflicts arouse the motivational system.
This arousal leads people to consider options more carefully, think
about them more deeply, and ultimately helps people to make the tradeoffs that
can make decisions difficult.
