The Elements of Choice

1

Shaping Choices

It is an illusion, really, that we alone determine what we choose. You walk into a restaurant and order a sandwich. Your spouse asks you what movie you want to see. Your doctor asks if you want to try a new drug to control your cholesterol. You search for a flight home for the holidays. You select an investment fund from your employer's retirement plan. You may not realize it, but in each choice, you have a hidden partner.

You choose something, but the restaurant, your spouse, the doctor, the airline's website, and your employer have all made decisions about how to pose those choices to you. Their design decisions will influence, intentionally or not, what you choose. The restaurant organized the sandwich options you saw, maybe with vegetarian on the right, meat on the left. Your spouse suggested some possible movies, but left others out. The doctor decided how to describe the consequences, side effects, and benefits of the drugs you could take to control your cholesterol. The website decided how to sort the flights and whether to present certain pieces of information, like the on-time performance of the flights and the baggage fees. And finally, your employer had a fund it would use for your retirement account if you did not make a choice.

We might vaguely agree that external factors influence our choices, but we don't appreciate that there are large and systematic ways in which presentation can change what we choose. Years of research have shown again and again that the way choices are posed affects our actions. We're much more likely to choose a retirement fund if the employer's website preselects that option for us. We make different choices if our doctor says that serious side effects occur in 1 percent of cases, as opposed to saying there are no side effects in 99 percent of cases. And while you might be convinced that you are picking the sandwich, many things about the menu, like the order of items and the

Eric J. Johnson is the Norman Eig Professor of Business and the director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School. He has been the president of both the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the Society for Neuroeconomics. He lives in New York City.

Praise for The Elements of Choice:

Indispensable.  This book provides an essential guide to the construction of better choices for yourself, for other individuals and for society. Daniel Kahneman, author of Noise and Thinking, Fast and Slow

Readers will be fascinated by this persuasive exploration.   Publishers Weekly

Illuminating A strong argument for more thoughtfully presenting options to yield better choices.   Kirkus

Eric Johnson is the world s leading expert on choice architecture. No one is better qualified to map the invisible webs of influence that constrain all we do. Philip E. Tetlock, author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

The Elements of Choice is a must-read for anyone interested in the hidden forces that shape our daily decisions. And as one of the foremost scholars of judgment and decision making, Eric Johnson is the perfect person to write this important and engaging book. Katy Milkman, author of How to Change

Eric Johnson offers a powerful tool kit for designing better end-to-end decision-making processes. His deep insight and expertise shine through on every page. Jonah Berger, author of The Catalyst and Contagious

Eric Johnson distills the modern science of decision-making with incomparable clarity and the most captivating stories. His book is a must read for anyone who wants to know how we can help one another make wiser choices. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit

Anyone serious about knowing how best to structure the features of an offered choice or how best to respond to the presence of those features needs to read this book. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion"

Every choice you make from the health plan you select to the sandwich you order for lunch was designed by someone. The Elements of Choice brilliantly reveals the subtle yet powerful levers that influence your decisions. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset

This book explains human