Page 49 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

49 CHAPTER 4 INFLUENCING THE MESSY MIDDLE

A summary of six biases

The names we’re using for these biases may or may not be familiar to you,

but the underlying definitions are congruent with those used in academic
behavioural science. Of course, you may well have used some of them in
your own campaigns, or recognise them at work in the ads of one of your
competitors or favourite brands.
1. Category heuristics are shortcuts or rules of thumb that aid us in making a

quick and satisfactory decision within a given category. An example would be
focusing on how many megapixels (MP) the camera has when purchasing
a smartphone or how many gigabytes (GB) of data are included in a mobile

phone contract.

Princeton psychologists, Shah and Oppenheimer, found heuristics reduce
11
cognitive effort through the following impacts on decision-making:

Examining fewer pieces of information

Relying on easy-to-access pieces of information

Simplifying the weighting of information

Integrating less information in a decision process

Considering fewer alternatives overall

2. Authority bias describes the tendency to alter our opinions or behaviours to

match those of someone we consider to be an authority on a subject. When
we’re unsure, we tend to follow the lead of people we believe to be credible
and knowledgeable experts, and therefore may use an authority view as a
mental shortcut. In one experiment, the brains of 24 college students were
scanned while making financial decisions. If students received advice from
a renowned economist, the scans showed that the decision-making parts of
students’ brains showed less activity as the students “offloaded” the burden

of the decision process to the expert.
12

11 Shah, A. K., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). Heuristics Made Easy: An Effort-Reduction Framework. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 207–222
12 Engelmann J. B., Capra C. M., Noussair, C., & Berns G. S. (2009). Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-
Making under Risk. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4957. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004957