THE INFLATED SENSE OF SELF:

Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard? (Jonah Lehrer, March 2, 2011, Wired)

I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drugstore is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?) Here are the scientists:

Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. People generally associate important decisions with difficulty. Consequently, if a decision feels unexpectedly difficult, due to even incidental reasons, people may draw the reverse inference that it is also important, and consequently increase the amount of time and effort they expend. Ironically, this process is particularly likely for decisions that initially seemed unimportant because people expect them to be easier.

To demonstrate their point, Sela and Berger conducted a number of clever experiments. In one test, they gave people a selection of airline flight options. One group was given these options in a small, low-contrast font (high-difficulty condition) while a second group was given the same options in a larger, high contrast font (low-difficulty condition). Not surprisingly, the hard-to-read font led to increased deliberation time, as people were forced to decipher their alternatives. What was more interesting is that this extra effort led to perceptions of increased importance: The flight options now seemed like a weighty decision with profound consequences.