“Unit 10: How People Decide”

The way people decide to take an action is less straightforward than we think. This chapter looks at how people make decisions.

People make most decisions unconsciously. Unconscious decisions include factors such as

1.)What other people are deciding to buy an example would be ratings and reviews done by other people that have bought a similar product you are looking at buying.

2.) What is consistent with the persona of the individual. If you are a mac buyer you will probably buy more mac products. If you are a person that stays up with the top trends you will probably buy more stuff more frequently ect.

3.) Whether you can pay off any obligations or social debts with this purchase. This could be something that you buy that you feel will be good for something or someone besides yourself, buying it because you think it will pay off in the long run.

4.) Fear or loss. The felling that if you don't get it someone else will. It's a now or never feeling. It could also be something that you think is in high demand and you buy it because you don't believe it will be there later. An example would be you buying 50 boxes of twinkies because they are going out of business, or buying a ton of pointless stuff on black friday that you don't really need but prices are good so why not.

5.) Your particular drives motivations, and fears.

These five things are decisions that we make unconsciously, these things are different than the research we do intentionally when deciding on buying a product.

Just because we say decisions are made contentiously however doesn't mean we are all impulse buyers, irrational, or bad. Because we are subjected to so many things a day our subconscious has evolved and developed super human powers that process most of the data to make decisions for us according to guidelines and rules that are best for us, the book refers to it as trusting you gut.

The unconscious knows first, they pick up and respond to ques and signals of danger, the book used a poker game as the example. The unconscious also acts more quickly than the conscious mind. unconscious minds rely on hunches before the conscious mind even knows what is going on. The poker game study basically gave each individual 2,000  fake dollars and told them to keep as much of it as possible and play a card game without knowing the rules. Each participant assumed certain things when going into the study and made there own conclusions without actually knowing what the right thing was. This means that people often take action or have preferences, but cannot explain why they prefer what they do.

People want more choices and more information than they can process. If you ask people it they prefer to choose from a few alternatives or have lots of choices, most people will say they want lots of choices.  However too many choices can overwhelm the individual and paralyze the thought process ( a study conducted by Sheena, called the art of choosing found that people that had too many choices will not choose at all).  The example the book used was setting up tables that sampled jam one table had a few flavors and the other had over twenty the table that was visited the most was the one with a larger variety but the people that went there only tasted a few flavors and didn't buy as frequently because they couldn't decide, this is because people can only remember three or four things at a time, and on the same note they can only decide among three or four things as well.

So when you design something make sure you resists from giving the person to many options , people will always say they want more options, so if they ask make sure you can deviate from the what they want. The rule of thumb is to have only about three to four options , and if you have more make sure you add them in a progressive way so it doesn't come off as overwhelming or something that would be easy to forget an example of this would be to have three options and some of those options have subset options.

People think Choice equals control. The need for control starts at a young age. Lyengar did a study with infants as young as four months that pulled on a string that controlled when the music was played. when the string was taken away from the and the music was still played at the same intervals the babies became sad and angry. All the conditions were the same except for the control that they has in choosing. The same is true with adults whether it is true or not people feel that choice equals control. For people to feel in control they need to feel that their actions are powerful and. that they have choices to make.  sometimes these choices are not good for the individual but it is still important for the individual to make them.

People when they make a choice wont always pick the best choice or the fastest route but it is important to give them options.

People may care more about time than money.  A study was conducted on spending time versus spending money. researchers hypothesis were that when you invoke time in the message you make more of a personal connection than when you invoke money. After the experiments were over the study found that people want to connect. The personal connection relates back to time.

Another thing that influences the decision making process is the individuals mood. some people make decisions intuitively and others in more of a deliberate way. If the person is in a good mood they are more likely to rate a product as being more valuable or have more of a positive experience towards it baised on their first feelings. If the individual is sad they will rate the items as being more valuable ins a deliberate way.  So basically you can influence people's moods by suggesting to them on how to think about a certain product.

Group decision making can be faulty, this is why we have things like controlled experiments so one persons thoughts don't contradict someone elses. Because people don't get ride of the outlier in a group it often makes them week when it comes to making a decision so giving people a way to consider the relevant information on their own before they see what others think is a good way to go about it. The example I thought about even though it wasn't designed based was playing a game on the soccer field. People play better when they play with people that are better, if they play with newbies, or people that have bad habits they are not being pushed and tend to develop bad habits themselves. We talked about group thinking as being bad because feelings arnt always fully expressed in big groups, but it works well among pairs as long as both people can freely discuss their disagreements.

So why is it that groups let others lead them in decision making even if they know it is wrong? The book says people are swayed by a dominant personality. There is always someone that take the lead role in a group that is how things get done, not everyone is an extravert and because of this not all group decisions are made by the entire group because not all people will voice their opinions. Because of this it is important to be careful in following the first solution just because its first. Have everyone come up with different solutions and make everyone talk so you can develope the best outcome.

When people are uncertain they let others decide for them. This is highly driven by fear of messing up, or not wanting to choose because others may disagree. People take action if others take action because then it isn't all just on them it's on the group. If testimonials and rating are involved as well it makes it easier for people to get involved because it gives them research on how it could work. People are easily influenced by other people so the more information you leave in a review about a person who left the review the more influential the rating will be.

People value a product more highly when it is physical in front of them. A test showed that when buying a product that people were more willing to buy it if it was in person, followed by a picture of a product, than lastly by a written description. This was the same across the board for toys, and  trinkets, samples of products, and whether it was olfactory. The hypothesis after this study was that they is a pavlovian response going on when the item is actually available right in front of the person.  When you are selling things a place that has products directly on hand, having products directly behind glass where the person feels they are unattainable can lower the price that the customer is willing to pay.