Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other. Expanding and Contracting Numerical Dimensions Produces Preference Reversals

Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other

This study won me over early for one reason: it starts with a reference to my favorite mockumentary: “This is Spinal Tap”. Not only is it rare to hear a cult movie referenced in academic research, but it is even rarer to have reference perfectly setup the purpose and results of the study. The scene described from “This is Spinal Tap” is where Nigel is showing off his stockpile of rock n’ roll gear and stumbles upon his amp that can play be turned up to 11. The director then argues about just making the amp louder and keeping it on a 10 point scale. The two banter back and forth. Watch the video clip below, I guarantee it’ll be funnier than me explaining.

Crank it up to 11 - Video Clip

Is eleven louder? No, but it sounds like it’s louder. If, god forbid, someone asked a group of people to rate my awesome 70s style haircut, would it sound cooler if 6 out of 9 people liked my haircut or 12 out of 18? Both scales show the same proportion, ~66.6%, but does the bigger scale increase my hair’s coolness factor? This is the idea that the researchers set out to prove. The obvious, and frustrating, example is made of Consumer Reports’ rating individual parts of a car on a 5 points scale, then changing the scale for the overall rating of the car to a 100 point scale.

So does the study conclude that the average Joe thinks like Nigel? You bet it did. Tell Fender and Marshall that the secret to increasing their sales price is to let people crank it up to 11, even if is only as loud as their old models. More importantly, should report the rating of my 70s haircut with a higher scale? Yes. Does it change the fact that it looks awful? No.

Citation:

Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other. Expanding and Contracting Numerical Dimensions Produces Preference Reversals

Psychological Science, Vol. 20, Issue 9, p. 1074-1078

Wiley.com link to article

Katherine A. Burson (University of Michigan), Richard P. Larrick (Duke), John G. Lynch Jr (Duke, now at University of Colorado, Boulder)

A Survey of the Research Community's Contribution to Information Visualization

Ringmap from Zhao, Forer, Harvey. Information Visualization Journal  (2008)

The purpose of this post will be different then ones from the past. Instead of talking about research others have done, I'm going to include some of my own work. This paper was the practicum project for my Master of Business Intelligence degree for the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. The focus of this paper is on information visualization contributions from the research community. This is not featuring visualizations such as bar and pie charts, although you can find them on another site I created, but what ways you can deal with large amounts of data. Primarily this paper explores how this can be done through interaction, animation, and some other clever methods.

This paper was especially fun to write since, like my degree, was interdisciplinary. Computer Science was of course strongly represented, but researchers such as Zhao, Forer, and Harvey were geography researchers. Non-academic researchers, such as George Furnas of Bell Communications, was also strongly covered in this paper. 

A Survey of the Research Community's Contribution to Information Visualization

Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making

I want to start this post by saying this study was what got me hooked on academic research. By chance I happened to catch an NPR report about the experiment performed in this study. The same quarter we were asked in my Statistical Modeling class to choose an interesting study, interpret the statistics, and present the findings of the study to the class. Naturally, I chose this study, not only because it was interesting, but because it was the type of research I could see myself working on in the future.

Baba Shiv (Stanford currently [University of Iowa at the time of the study]) and Alexander Fedorikhin (Indiana University [Washington State at time of the study]) performed an experiment where they asked subjects to memorize a number, then move to the next room to recite the number. Inbetween the room someone would stop the participant, thank them and offer them the choice of chocolate cake or a fruit salad, after making the decision they were given a ticket of the type of food to take to the next room. A price sticker of $1 was put on each item to show that they were equally valuable. In the second room they would recall the number they were asked to memorize. Of course, this was not a memory experiment, but an experiment looking at the effects of processing information and consumer choice.


The results showed that subjects that memorized the longer number were more likely to choose the chocolate cake and the subjects that memorized the smaller number were more likely to choose the fruit salad. 


One of the reasons I love experiments like this is that it 1) brings out my clever marketing side and 2) it helps me realize my own tendencies to choose products that are either unhealthy or more expensive them I would normally choose. Most importantly, the experiment is fun.


The study also mentions that finding a way to occupy consumers minds while shopping may also help. Whether intentional or not, Albertsons does this with the giant flat screen TVs blasting high volume information about things, such as how to pick good fruits and vegtables, to celebrity gossip at the checkout line. I always thought it'd be fun to open a sugary snack booth in the lobby of an engineering firm. 


Citation:
Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making
Journal of Consumer Research, Vol 26, p. 278-292
University of Denver Link to Article 
Baba Shiv (Stanford currently [University of Iowa at the time of the study]) and Alexander Fedorikhin (Indiana University currently [Washington State at time of the study])

From Fear to Loathing? How Emotion Influences the Evaluation and Early Use of Innovations

Nothing will make you feel like an alpha geek more then successfully installing  and running Linux. Earlier in my academic career, when I was on the techie IT trajectory, anyone who ditched Windows and used Linux was the king of geeks. Accomplishing this feat immediately gave you a throne built of pure ego that all other lesser geeks had to bow before. As my user interface professor, Dr. Murli Nagasundaram, would say about learning the command line interface "It makes you feel like more of a man [once you've learned it]." That said, it was a big goal of mine to be the Linux king. For about 3 summers I went through this cycle: I would remove Windows, install Linux, get familiar with it then abandon it when classes began, until the next summer when the cycle restarted. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but after the pain of getting Linux working on my machine, even though I enjoyed its benefits once it was working, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Consequently, when the decision to drop Linux and go back to Windows came, it was an easy choice. Furthermore, I didn't promote using Linux or talk much about it afterwards.


Stacy L. Wood and C. Page Moreau address this phenomenon in their research article "From Fear to Loathing? HowEmotion Influences the Evaluationand Early Use of Innovations" that was published in The Journal of Marketing in July of 2006. Their research showed how consumer's view of a product can be tainted by difficulties in learning new technologies, despite enjoying the product once they figure it out. In addition, oversimplifying the difficulty of learning a product can also have negative effects on consumer's view of a product. I ran into this similar problem from reading RedHat Linux's installation and operating instructions on how easy their flavor of Linux was to operate; keep in mind this was in the early 2000's when Linux was light years less user friendly then today. The study also suggests that products that are difficult to learn should come with an advocate, Best Buy's Geek Squad is mentioned, to help you get started. Years after giving up my alpha geek dreams of being the Linux master, I noticed that nearly everyone I met that had been successful in solely using Linux had a geeky mentor that helped them out. 

Citations:
From Fear to Loathing? HowEmotion Influences the Evaluationand Early Use of Innovations
Journal of Marketing, Vol 70, p. 44-57
AMA Link to Article

Stacy L. Wood (University of South Carolina) and C. Page Moreau University of Colorado at Boulder)

Chasing the Hottest IT: Effects of Information Technology Fashion on Organizations

During my internship at Boise State University I worked with a fellow student that was everything geek. He played D&D regularly, had an amazing amount of knowledge about everything IT, was up on all the latest versions of Linux, and could implement nearly anything thrown at him. While everyone working there, especially our boss, admired him there was tricky part of working with him: he loved to implement new stuff for the sake that it was cutting edge. Often we were at odds over this, we were from two different worlds, techie and business. He was looking at what the technology could do and I was running a cost-benefit analysis. 


In the March of 2010 volume of MIS Quarterly Ping Wang investigates companies that are always after the hottest technology and those that still have an ENIAC in the basement. Ping approached this study by using information published and annual IT budgets for 109 large comapnies. With this information he found that companies that invest in the next hottest thing in IT don't necessarily perform better; however, they do gain stronger reputation and executive compensation in the short term. 


As Ping mentions in his research, this can mean different things depending on the company. If you are following the newest IT trends and seeing poor performance, perhaps you should scale back a bit. On the other hand, this also means that if your company's IT department is viewed as a house full of dinosaur tamers, perhaps following some of the newest IT trends might improve your image. As the author suggest, a balance between the two extremes is the best choice.

Citations: 
Chasing the Hottest IT: Effects of Information Technology Fashion on Organizations
MIS Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 1, p. 63-85
University of Denver link to study
Ping Wang (University of Maryland at College Park)

Let Us Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow We Shall Die: Effects of Mortality Salience and Self-Esteem on Self Regulation in Consumer Choice

I've come to enjoy research that Baba Shiv, Professor of Marketing at Stanford, has been producing. While, at times, his research could seem strange, it really gets to the core of consumer behavior. Baba, along with Rosellina Ferraro and James R. Bettman from Duke, produced an interesting paper "Let Us Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow We Shall Die: Effects of Mortality Salience and Self-Esteem on Self Regulation in Consumer Choice" that was published in The Journal of Consumer Research in June of 2005.

The study looks to investigate self-regulation in consumer decision making when faced with thoughts of death.

As is common, and fun, in Baba Shiv research the choice of chocolate cake and fruit salad is used in two of the three the experiments to get an idea of how well subject's self-regulatory systems kicked in.

Experiment one's purpose is to "examine the effects of mortality salience on choices of an indulgent food option and the role of gender and body esteem in moderating these effects" (Shiv, 67). Subjects were under the guize that they they would be asked to talk about an event that occurred recently and afterword the choice of chocolate cake or fruit salad was the snack provided for taking part in the research. Questions for one group asked about the September 11th attacks, while the control group was asked about a fire that occurred on campus in November of 2001, no deaths occurred from this fire. Once the questions were asked the subjects then were allowed to choose chocolate cake or fruit salad in private. Subjects were asked questions about their body esteem as well. The results of this experiment showed that women with low body esteem chose the chocolate cake more often when they were asked about the September 11th attacks than the campus fire. Women with high body esteem chose fruit salad more often when asked about the September 11th attacks. Men were not affected by talking about either event.

Experiment two's purpose is to "examine the role of making earlier coping behaviors salient in moderating the effects observed in experiment one" (Shiv, 69). Only women participated in this experiment. The same experiment was performed, but asked the female participants to focus on explaining their emotions about past events. The findings were similar in women of experiment one, that chocolate cake was chosen higher among women with low body esteem when asked about September 11th. Women of high body esteem chose fruit salad when asked about September 11th.

Experiment three tried to reproduce the findings of experiment 1 and 2 by using charitable donations instead of food choices. People high on virtue as a source of self-esteem, were more likely to give to charity. Individuals low on virtue as a source of self esteem were less likely to donate more. Both men and women were more likely to react the same way.

While on the surface the findings are really common sense; if someone recalling events that cause anxiety about death they will seek out products or activities that boost their self-esteem. I saw this with my mother after a near miss car accident caused a little overboard shopping trip. We also see this with the massive amounts of blood and money donations whenever there is a disaster. I think it is normal, and healthy, for people to seek out comfort when presented with the fact that they may die sooner then they think.

While it would be clearly unethical to give your customers near death experiences as they walk in the store or blast TV screens showing the 9-11 attacks, I'd like to argue that marketing what comforts people is essentially going along with nature. This NPR article, released around the same time as this study, talks about this effect: "Anthropologists tell us that our predecessors would chow down on high-calorie, fatty foods because some brain wave told them to grab a leg of deep fried Tyrannosaurus Rex whenever possible to store up fat for leaner times". In a way products and services are easing the burden of already busy therapists during tragedies (almost).

Citations:

Let Us Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow We Shall Die: Effects of Mortality Salience and Self-Esteem on Self Regulation in Consumer Choice

Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 32, June 2005, p. 65-75

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/429601

Rosellina Ferraro (Duke)

Baba Shiv (Stanford)

James R. Bettman (Duke)