Melbourne, Victoria, AUS. A new study finds that sometimes it's easier to ask people to reject an option than to choose one. After all, we have found out that some choices are indeed tougher than others. Let's say it is the US election season. You are a die-hard Kucinich supporter or a Republican but now find yourself for practical reasons having to choose between Hillary and Obama. The study reveals that sometimes rejecting an option makes it easier for consumers to decide among unsatisfactory options.

 

“If both the alternatives are attractive, then both provide reasons to choose, and therefore are compatible with the choose task,” explain Anish Nagpal (University of Melbourne) and Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy (University of Houston).

 

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Attribute Conflict in Consumer Decision Making: The Role of Task Compatibility. Anish Nagpal and Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy. Journal of Consumer Research. Vol. 34, February 2008. 0093-5301/2008/3405-0008. DOI: 10.1086 / 521903.

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The authors say in the Journal of Consumer Research that “If both the alternatives are unattractive, neither one provides reasons to choose, and are therefore incompatible with the choose task.” Thus, if a choice is difficult, it might not be the options that are causing the indecisiveness, but the way the decision is framed. The researchers argue that it is difficult to choose among undesirable options because none of the items offers a reason to choose it.

 

Indeed, asking people to choose among undesirable things leads to greater experienced conflict and greater decision difficulty, which may manifest as longer decision times. The researchers show that people tend to have an easier time choosing among things they like than among things they hate. In one study, choices were made almost 20 percent quicker between desirable alternatives (an average of 70.09 seconds) than between undesirable alternatives (an average of 86.93 seconds).

 

The reverse was true when consumers were asked to reject an option. Decisions involving unattractive alternatives were more than 20 percent quicker (an average of 69.50 seconds) than attractive alternatives (an average of 88.57 seconds) when consumers were asked to “reject” — as opposed to “choose” — an unappealing option.

 

“This suggests that consumers can control the level of difficulty that they experience by changing their decision task,” the researchers write, pointing out that consumers faced with a difficult choice have been known to give up and defer the decision to a later date.

 

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Anish Nagpal is lecturer, Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne. Partha Krishnamurthy is associate professor of marketing and Bauer Faculty Fellow at the C. T. Bauer College of Business Administration, University of Houston. This research is based on the Nagpal's dissertation.

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Attribute Conflict in Consumer Decision Making: The Role of Task Compatibility. Anish Nagpal and Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy. Journal of Consumer Research. Vol. 34, February 2008. 0093-5301/2008/3405-0008. DOI: 10.1086 / 521903.

 

Abstract. Past research holds that a decision between two unattractive alternatives is more difficult than one between two attractive alternatives. We argue that this conclusion may rest on the the task of “choosing” adopted in the past research. A task of choosing requires an attractiveness judgment that is compatible with attractive alternatives but incompatible with unattractive alternatives. We test this thesis by reversing the compatibility using a reject task that requires judgment of unattractiveness. Two studies find that compatibility between alternative valence and task influences decision time, decision difficulty, attribute recall, and effort, underscoring the role of the task in the study of attribute conflict.

 

 

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