The Paradox of Choice - How We Choose (Entry II)

As mentioned previously, consumers today are provided with more and more varieties of goods and services. As a result, making a satisfying decision can be tricky and time consuming, to say the least. With advertisements everywhere, consumers are oftentimes exposed to misleading statistics that could persuade them to make poor choices.

Barry Schwartz mentions a major factor that can dissuade decision makers from making a satisfying choice—the availability heuristic. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky reported this discovery and stated that people have a tendency to give undue weight to some types of information. The availability heuristic says that people logically assume that the more available something is to their memory, the more frequently we have encountered it in the past. However, this is only partly true because salience, or a memory’s vividness, also matters greatly (Schwartz 58).

Schwartz gives the following example: a consumer is seeking to purchase a safe and reliable car. He dutifully checks Consumer Reports, a trustworthy source, and discovers that Volvos are ranked highest for safety and reliability. Later, however, a friend gives an emotional, vivid account of how the Volvo she bought six months ago gave her nothing but trouble. Since most people give undue but substantial weight to these types of salient, anecdotal “evidence,” the positive ranking from the Consumer Reports may be cancelled out. Thus, that consumer may be dissuaded from purchasing a Volvo.

Going back to the Nisbett article on holistic versus analytic perception, I have realized that Westerners could be dramatically different decision makers than Asians. Since Westerners generally tend to focus on a salient aspect, independent of its context, they may be more liable to give more undue weight to vivid, personal accounts. On the other hand, because Asians tend to have a more holistic perception, they may weigh such salient accounts much less in their decision making. By relying more on facts and less on arbitrary, individual cases, decision makers would be more likely to gain greater utility from their choices.