On What Basis Should I Make a Choice?” Influencing Decision Making with a Choice Mindset
Research Seminars
Academic Areas Organisational Behaviour
Krishna Savani, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, National University of Singapore
May 3, 2013
| 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Friday
AC 2 MLT (Mini Lecture Theatre), Level -2, hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
For ISB Community
Abstract:
We test the hypothesis that inducing people to construe minor actions as active choices would lead them to ask the question, “On what basis should I make the choice?”, thus leading people to focus on relevant criteria when making decisions. Study 1 found that inducing people to construe actions as choices leads them to look longer at relevant (compared to non-relevant) attributes in a multi-attribute decision paradigm. Study 2 similarly showed that for risky decisions, construing actions as choices focuses people’s attention on the expected value and variance of the risky option’s outcomes. Study 3 found that choice-construal leads people to base intertemporal decisions on the implied rate of return, and Study 4 demonstrated that this effect is mediated by greater visual attention to rate-of-return information. Overall, the findings indicate that subtle changes in how people view their everyday actions can have profound consequences for their subsequent decisions.
We test the hypothesis that inducing people to construe minor actions as active choices would lead them to ask the question, “On what basis should I make the choice?”, thus leading people to focus on relevant criteria when making decisions. Study 1 found that inducing people to construe actions as choices leads them to look longer at relevant (compared to non-relevant) attributes in a multi-attribute decision paradigm. Study 2 similarly showed that for risky decisions, construing actions as choices focuses people’s attention on the expected value and variance of the risky option’s outcomes. Study 3 found that choice-construal leads people to base intertemporal decisions on the implied rate of return, and Study 4 demonstrated that this effect is mediated by greater visual attention to rate-of-return information. Overall, the findings indicate that subtle changes in how people view their everyday actions can have profound consequences for their subsequent decisions.
