Variety Seeking Behavior Has A Large Literature
My Halloween post is about variety seeking. This is an active topic in consumer psychology. There is a strain of research that asks why some people embrace variety more than others. I generally am less excited by work on the stable differences between people, traits. People do differ but my sense is that we often overestimate the importance of traits. Plus pragmatically traits are, by definition, relatively hard to change.
Presentation Changes Choice
I find more interesting how people react to the way choices are presented to us. Back in 1990 Itamar Simonson published an article examining how people’s decisions change depending upon how a choice is presented. In this article subjects were facing with a choice. The choice was presented either as a single choice of several items or as a sequential choice of items one at a time. The author found that, amongst other things, uncertainty about our own future preferences is a problem for consumers.
Simonson (1990, page 152) suggested that: “Consumers who simultaneously choose multiple items in a single category for sequential consumption are more likely to choose different items than consumers who sequentially make the same number of choices.”
Simonson completed two studies. One study involved hypothetical choices and one real choices. The real choices looked at how people’s choice of snack varied on how they are asked. Specifically, people tend to seek more variety when making two choices at the same time than sequential choices.
You Can Experiment At Home
This Halloween take a page from Simonson’s book. When offering trick or treaters candy do a little experiment. Ask some to choose two candies. Ask others to choose one, let them prepare to go and then say they can choose another. I’m not sure it’ll work; both the experimental setup and the theory — especially given the sequential group will make their choices very closely together — aren’t perfect. That said you can teach your family a bit about consumer psychology and it’ll make Halloween a bit more exciting.
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Read: Itamar Simonson (1990) Effect of Purchase Quantity and Timing on Variety Seeking Behavior, Journal of Marketing Research, Volume XXVII, pages 150-162