Page 142 - The Social Animal

124 The Social Animal

shopping with a real estate agent. After determining your needs, the
agent drives you to some homes “you might find interesting.” The
first stop is a tiny two-bedroom house sitting on a smallish lot. The
house needs a new coat of paint; the interior is in disarray; the
linoleum in the kitchen is buckling; the living room carpet is worn
and smells bad; the master bedroom is so small that an average-sized
bedroom suite simply won’t fit. When the realtor tells you the ask-
ing price, you are stunned: “Holy cow! They want that much for this
place? Who’d be dumb enough to pay so much for this shack?” Cer-
tainly not you, and probably not anyone else. But how do you sup-
pose viewing that dilapidated house might influence your evaluation
of the average-looking house you are shown next?
In a sense, the dilapidated house is a decoy—and decoys can ex-
ercise a powerful impact on our decisions, by influencing the way the
alternatives look.This process was nicely illustrated in an experiment
11
by Anthony Pratkanis and his colleagues. In this experiment, in the
control condition, students were asked to make a series of decisions
such as the following: Which would you select, (a) or (b)?

a. Nutri-burger: a burger made from tofu and other vegetables
that is rated very good on nutrition but only average on taste.
b. Tasti-burger: a hamburger that is rated very good on taste but
only average on nutrition.

So far, so good.The decision is a clear one: If you want good taste
more than good nutrition, you will go for the Tasti-burger; if nutri-
tion matters more, you will go for the Nutri-burger. And in this ex-
periment, roughly half the students selected the Tasti-burger and
half selected the Nutri-burger.
But suppose we were working for the makers of Tasti-burger.
How might we make it more attractive? We might insert a decoy. A
decoy is an alternative that is clearly inferior to other possible selec-
tions—but serves the purpose of making one of the others—the one
to which it’s most similar—look better by comparison. In the Pratka-
nis experiment, half the students were given the following choice:
Which would you prefer, (a), (b), or (c)?

a. Nutri-burger: a burger made from tofu and other vegetables
that is rated very good on nutrition but only average on taste
[exactly as described in the control condition].