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| Does Personal Comfort Justify Our Use Of Categories? |
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| Living - Society | |||
| TS-Si News Service | |||
| Sunday, 20 July 2008 17:00 | |||
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Chicago, IL, USA. As human beings, we use categories to organize the details of a complex world. We experience a certain comfort in the convenience and predictability of categories. That seems to work until somone else comes along with their own category for us that we don't like. Well, the other person got it wrong: we don't fit into that category, or do we?
Is it possible that comfort alone is a justification for categorization? Out in the real world of daily choices, most of us have stood in a supermarket aisle, overwhelmed with the array of choices. New research suggests those choices are easier if the options are categorized.
The Mere Categorization Effect: How the Presence of Categories Increases Choosers’ Perceptions of Assortment Variety and Outcome Satisfaction. Cassie Mogilner, Tamar Rudnick, and Sheena S. Iyengar. Journal of Consumer Research. August 2008. Vol. 35. doi: 10.1086 / 588698. ISSN: 0093-5301/2008/3502-0002.
The findings appear in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). The authors demonstrate an interesting phenomenon called the “mere categorization effect,” where consumers are happier with their choices if their options are categorized, even if the categories are meaningless.
Authors Cassie Mogilner (Stanford University), Tamar Rudnick, and Sheena S. Iyengar (both from Columbia University) say that “People confronted with highly categorized large selections are happier with their decisions because they experience a sense of self-determination as a result of perceiving differences among the available options.”
“Although it is assumed the size of a selection is more important to the consumer than the number of categories, the findings of this investigation reveal the opposite to be true,” write the authors.
“Categorization can benefit retailers by providing them with an alternative to stocking additional volumes of goods. Categorization can also alleviate marketers’ and consumers’ desire for ever-increasing choices by enabling consumers to discover variety, experience self-determination, and obtain satisfaction simply by highlighting the variety already available.”
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| Last Updated on Sunday, 20 July 2008 17:38 |





























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