Columbia professor Ray Fisman was interviewed by Hermes magazine about his research on speed dating. Some interesting observations relavent to behavioral decision making:

3. Does your study measure how well what people say they look for matches with what they actually look for?

Most of what I do is work on corruption in poor countries. If I want to know how much someone is paying in bribes, I’m not going to ask them, “How much did you pay in bribes last year?” I’m going to say, “The guy down the street from you, who looks pretty much like you, how much did he pay?” Similarly, in the speed-dating study we ask people, “What do you care about?” We also ask them, “The average man, what do you think he cares about?” But then we actually see how they behave in the game. And, not at all surprisingly, what they say the average man cares about lines up much more closely with what they actually reveal through their actions than what they claimed they cared about beforehand. In particular, everyone — both men and women — says they care less about physical attractiveness than the average.

4. Do you think speed-dating is more efficient than traditional search methods?

In some sense, it’s efficient: there are all these slice studies on how 10 seconds’ worth of observation is as predictive of your experience with a professor as a semester’s worth, and they’ve reduced it to 2 seconds and that’s just as good; and they’ve reduced it to just a photo and that’s pretty good, too. So you learn a lot in four minutes, perhaps as much in four minutes as you do in a much longer superficial interaction like, say, a date. So, this does meaningfully provide you with 20 rapid-fire dates, to the extent that we form as much of an impression in 4 minutes, or 10 seconds, as we do in 4 hours. The thing that’s left out of this neat decomposition of people into attributes, though, is actually learning to love someone. And that’s what I think is kind of missing. Focusing on people as a bundle of attributes almost makes people think about this decision in the wrong frame of mind.

5. Do you think people become unwilling to commit because of all the choices dating services enable?

Yes. And the way that you can make these choices — just the very fact that it’s set up in this way — distorts the way people choose. There was an article in the New York Times on a backlash against Internet dating, and I wonder to what degree that’s at least partly as a result of these sorts of realizations.

6. The results of your speed-dating studies, particularly with regard to intelligence and physical appearance, seem to reinforce gender stereotypes. Why do you think this is?

Well, they are stereotypes for a reason. However, it’s not as simple as, “I avoid all women who are ambitious or intelligent.” It’s about, “Intelligence and ambition is OK until it supersedes my own.” It’s also worth mentioning that these are average effects — there are surely men who do not have this property. I like to think I’m one of them: my significant other is definitely a lot smarter than I am. When her grandmother heard about me, she said, “I told your mother this, and now I’m going to tell you: never let a man think you’re smarter than he is. Men don’t like that.” Everyone laughed and thought this was so anachronistic, but it shows up in our data. Grandma’s views on dating aren’t so dated after all!

Read more: Dating Data: Economic Theory and the Search for a Mate

Modern life in America brings with it a degree of personal choice which is unprecedented in history. A typical American faces an abundance of options for most decisions they face throughout the day. We have scores of stores to shop at, restaurants of all varieties to eat at, hundreds of channels of cable or satellite television to watch, and millions of songs to listen to on iTunes. A visit to Starbucks alone allows us to choose from over 38 million potential coffee drinks. In our culture it is almost always assumed that more choice makes us better off. Choice allows people to match their own tastes and preferences more closely. If my favorite coffee drink is a decaf soy sugar-free vanilla latte, it is unlikely that I was very happy with my cup of straight black coffee at the local coffeehouse before Starbucks came to town. Yet in important and overlooked ways, abundant choice can sometimes leave us less happy than we would have been with a more modest set of options.

Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, researches the situations in which more choice can make us less well off, or where we prefer to have our choices artificially restricted. Her research has yielded counterintuitive results about the relationship between choice and satisfaction. Here she describes a few of her studies:

To explore consumer responses to extensive options, we conducted a field investigation in an upscale grocery store, Draeger’s, in Menlo Park, Calif. On two consecutive Saturdays, a tasting booth for Wilkin & Sons exotic jams was arranged. As consumers passed the tasting booth, they encountered a display with either six or 24 different jams. We observed and calculated the number of people who stopped at the tasting booth as well as the number of people who chose to purchase the jam in question.

The results are striking. They demonstrate that although extensive choice is initially more enticing than limited choice, limited choice is ultimately more motivating. In fact, 60 percent of the passersby approached the table in the extensive-choice condition, as compared to only 40 percent in the limited-choice condition. However, 30 percent of the consumers who encountered the limited selection actually purchased a jam, whereas only 3 percent of those exposed to the extensive selection made a purchase.

In subsequent studies we found that people are actually less satisfied with the choices they make if selected from a larger set of options. For instance, the same Godiva chocolate chosen from a set of 30 chocolates is considered to be less delicious than if it is chosen from a set of six. Moreover, we found that the negative consequences of too much choice extend beyond consumer contexts to work contexts. An examination of individuals completing a task chosen from a larger range of options as compared to a smaller set of options revealed that people performed better at their chosen activities if they have chosen the activity from a smaller range of options.

These results have important implications for the business world, that we are just beginning to understand. Marketers in particular need to be careful to structure consumer choice to prevent regret from eroding the satisfaction people get from their purchasing decisions. Ms. Iyengar has done choice research in many other contexts as well, which I’ll discuss in later posts.

Read more: Hermes Magazine - Choice and its Discontents

Previously:

• Too Many Choices: Who Suffers and Why?
• The Paradox of Choice