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Summary 23
first brand. Apparently this was because it was difficult to find reasons to
justify this worthless bonus and people felt that they might be exposed
to criticism if they chose the option that was associated with it.
Factors that affect how people make choices
How do people select from their toolbox of heuristics? The key factors
appear to be: (i) the time available to make the decision, (ii) the effort that a
given strategy will involve, (iii) the decision maker’s knowledge about the
environment,(iv)theimportance of making an accurate decision,(v)whether
or not the decision maker has to justify his or her choice to others and (vi) a
desire to minimize conflict (for example, the conflict between the pros and
cons of moving to another job).
Payne et al. 12 argue that decision makers choose their strategies to
balance the effort involved in making the decision against the accuracy
that they wish to achieve (the ‘effort–accuracy framework’). When a given
level of accuracy is desired they attempt to achieve this with the minimum
of effort and use one of the simpler heuristics. Where greater
weight is placed on making an accurate decision then more effort will
be expended. There is also evidence that people often use a combination
of strategies. When faced with a long list of alternatives they use quick,
relatively easy methods to eliminate options to obtain a ‘short list’.
Then they apply more effortful strategies to select the preferred option
from the short list. In addition, a requirement to justify a decision to
others is likely to increase the likelihood that reason-based choice will
be used.
Summary
This chapter has reported studies of how unaided decision makers
make choices when they want to achieve several objectives. In these
circumstances people tend not to make trade-offs by accepting poorer
performance on some attributes in exchange for better performance on
others. However, recent research has suggested that people’s decisionmaking
skills are not as poor as was once believed. In particular, the
work of Gigerenzer et al. 2 indicates that humans have developed simple
heuristics that can lead to quick decisions, involving little mental
effort, and that these heuristics are often well adapted to particular
tasks.