Webinars
MSI Webinar: Using Choice Architecture to Design Better Decisions
You are a choice architect.
Yes, it is a job you didn’t know you have, and its one that you do several times a day, whenever you present a choice to someone else, and you are affected by choice architecture dozens of times in a day.
Many things determine your choices. Consider a restaurant menu: Clearly the delightful food on the menu and their prices will influence what you choose, but other things will as well. The menu designer is your hidden partner in making this choice. They have decided the order of items on the menu, organized into categories (meat and fish or vegan vs. vegetarian) and decided what attributes to use to describe the dishes: You might make different choices if calories were listed, or a heart healthy sticker was present. And don’t get started on the flowery phrases. The designer has influenced you in ways that you are not aware.
Of course you also poise choices. You suggested to your spouse a set of place where you might dine. Decisions about the order of restaurant, how to organize them into categories (fancy vs. casual), and decided how to describe them. (did you talk about travel time? Speed of service?). You didn’t realize but your decisions influenced your spouse’s choice.
Whether you are designing a web site to sell insurance, giving your employees a choice of assignments, or giving you child a choice of how to get into bed, your designs will influence their choices. In this talk, Eric Johnson, The Director of the Center for Decision Science at Columbia and a professor of Marketing, will outline some of the principle that make choice architecture such a powerful tool, sharing lessons from his book The Elements of Choice: Why How We Decide Matters.
speaker
Eric Johnson is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences, Columbia Business School at Columbia University. His research examines the interface between Behavioral Decision Research, Economics and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania, and was a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow at Stanford. Honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology, being named a Fellow by the Association for Consumer Research and the Association for Psychological Science, and an honorary doctorate in Economics from the University of St. Gallen. His work is highly cited in Psychology, Business and Economics. He has also been president of the Society for Neuroeconomics and the Society for Judgement and Decision-Making, ad was a visiting scholar at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 2014-2017. His newest book is The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters.