Post-Rational Decision-Making
From CS260SP09
Contents |
Readings
Coming soon, in the mean time you may want to look at these:
Recommended
Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions Timothy Wilson, Jonathan Schooler, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60(2) 181-192, 1991.
The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals John A. Bargh et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(6), 1014-1027, 2001.
The Influence of Negation on Product Evaluations Susan Jung Grant, Prashant Malaviya, Brian Sternthal, Journal of Consumer Research 31, 583-591, 2004. What I'd like to focus on here is not so much the details of negation processing, but the presence of two apparently different mechanisms for processing assertions and their negations.
Discussions
Please post your critiques/commments on the required readings below. To do that, first login by using your user name and password, then click the "edit" tab on the top part of this page (between the "discussion" page and the "history" page), New to wikis? Read the Wiki editing guide. . Hint - Please put a whole line == ~~~~ == (literally) at the beginning of your submitted critique, so the wiki system will index, sign and date your submission automatically.
KetrinaYim 02:24, 6 May 2009 (PDT)
The study of negation in product evaluations leads me to wonder if similar studies have been conducted on how people respond to questions. I have heard that the way a question is worded can affect the answer that is received. This has implications in data collection, such as surveys and questionnaires, and methods of persuasion.
Seth Horrigan 12:10, 6 May 2009 (PDT)
I could not find the exact study of which I was thinking, but this Iyengar piece illustrates the idea quite nicely. There is a paradox of choice: we, as actors, believe that we want more choices, but when it is tested empirically, we really do not. Given too many choices (in most cases more than 4 to 6 alternatives), we are less satisfied with any option whether we actually choose one or not: http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/whenchoice.html
Of course, given only one choice, we may feel disappointed by the lack of choice, but given two, we can easily weigh and identify the advantages and disadvantages of each. Previous discussions I have seen of the topic also illustrated what John mentioned today - asking people to think about their choice-making inhibits it by making it too explicit. We, as humans, are good at "intuitively" weighing alternatives and choosing the best, but when we have to make that explicit, either due to focusing on too limited a scope or due to some unidentified intervening variable, our ability to choose decreases radically.
Ragnar Skulason 21:58, 6 May 2009 (PDT)
I read a study few months ago about the value of free, which I found quite interesting and in contrast with todays material. Peoples decision making rational changes in quite inserting ways if something becomes free. You can read it here:
Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products
Brian Tran 23:41, 6 May 2009 (PDT)
I like John's example today where he asked what treatment should be chosen to save people, but presented them in two different ways to show the lack of human judgment to think rationally when presented with consequences. The exampled proved that we think in terms of negative consequences. Do we choose to think this way or is this simply a case of human nature? I would venture to say that people choose to think in terms of what has the most negative consequences because we think of significant negative consequences as closing doors. In other words, we're scared of losing second chances. This makes me wonder what people would do in instances where people have to choose between two different forces of human nature (something less abstract). How do we rationalize between choosing food and water when we're equally hungry and thirsty? Would we still be biased by a fear?
Simon Tan 04:09, 13 May 2009 (PDT)
@Brian: In terms of persuasive techniques, what you're talking about with second chances would be scarcity, no? We perceive that if we close a door, we're making fewer options available to ourselves, so we avoid doing it as much as possible.
I have noticed that humans are pretty irrational when it comes to anything involving the trade-off of present rewards vs. future rewards. It is known that we have difficulty reasoning about this sort of thing, and it's what makes activities such as gambling and trading in the stock market risky business.
