Tuesday, 7.51pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the decision right. – Phil McGraw
What makes us choose one thing over another? One product or service over another product or service? Are there patterns to our decisions and what might those look like?
Here are some thoughts from a survey article on the subject [1].
As early as 1960 Bauer suggested that what matters is the “perceived risk” of the decision [2].
Much of the work in between the 60s and 90s seems to have focused on logical or quantitative decision approaches.
I’ve recently been catching up on Star Wars.
This is the kind of approach Spock might take – rational, unemotional.
What matters are probabilities and decimal points.
This approach to decision making suggests that one should gather all the facts, have a clear objective and make an optimal choice.
We see this kind of approach in situations from procurement to recruitment, consisting of a two stage process of first short listing and then making a final choice [3].
The difficulty is that it’s not always possible to gather all the information needed to make a decision.
Sometimes it’s an emotional decision, we rely on instinct and connection.
Or we use heuristics – shortcuts and rules of thumb that help us choose between one and the other.
There are two kinds of heuristics at play [4].
Stored heuristics are ones that we pull out when we know quite a bit about the product or service and the choice is pretty trivial.
On Ebay, for example, you probably have enough experience to work out that something that’s too cheap sold by a seller with little history and a dodgy address should be avoided.
Constructive heuristics are used in areas where you have little experience and the choices are hard ones.
This second area is the one that seems to resonate with the field of problem structuring methods (PSMs).
Yesterday’s post, by the way, that talked about trust in decision making echoes McGuire’s concept of the “lazy organism” where humans ask someone they trust for advice [5].
Where we are now is understanding that real world decision making is a little more nuanced than that.
There’s the individual (or group of individuals) involved and their environment.
The way they perceive their environment frames the way in which they think about and eventually make decisions.
We have to understand the impact they have on their situation and the impact their situation has on them to be able to suggest courses of action that they can agree with and approve.
This is not an easy thing to do.
Workshops and facilitation methods try and do this but there’s a difference – facilitators are neutral parties that try to help participants come to a decision while sometimes what’s needed is an engaged participant that can get involved and contribute to the discussion and process of decision making.
Different methods work in different situations and the starting point is to get better at knowing what to use and when.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
References
- Babutsidze, Z., 2012. How do consumers make choices? A survey of evidence. Journal of Economic Surveys, 26(4), pp.752-762.
- Bauer, R.A. (1960) Consumer Behavior as Risk Taking. In: Hancock, R.S., Ed., Dynamic Marketing for a Changing World, Proceedings of the 43rd. Conference of the American Marketing Association, 389-398.
- Lussier, D.A. and Olshavsky, R.W., 1979. Task complexity and contingent processing in brand choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 6(2), pp.154-165.
- Bettman, J.R., 1971. The structure of consumer choice processes. Journal of marketing research, 8(4), pp.465-471.
- McGuire, W. J. The nature of attitudes and attitude change. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.),The handbook of social psychology (2nd ed., Vol.3). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969
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