Choices from Identical Options

Many of the decisions that people must make involve selections from arrays of identical options. The six studies presented explored people's preferences in two contexts: choosing one item from rows of identical items and choosing a route from a series of identical routes. The first three studies examined preferences for items in particular positions. Whether people were choosing a product from a grocery shelf, deciding which bathroom stall to use, or marking a box on a questionnaire, they avoided the ends and tended to make their selection from the middle. For example, when there were four rows of a product in the supermarket, only 29% of the purchases were from the first and last rows, and 71% were from the middle two. The last three studies examined whether a similar preference exists in picking a route when all ofthe available routes are the same length and require the same number of turns. In solving mazes, planning routes on maps, and walking around campus, people showed the pattern opposite to that found for choosing items in rows: They avoided the middle routes and tended to take either the first or the last one. Overall, the last available route was the favorite. The notion that these behaviors may minimize mental effort is explored. People, throughout their lives, face a vast array of tough choices. They must pick spouses, careers, homes, cars, outfits, and entrees, A great deal of attention has been devoted to this whole spectrum of choices, investigating how people maximize utility (Bentham, 1825), examining the role of attitudes (Rajecki, 1990), Mid documenting deviations from optimality (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). There are, however, types of choices Address correspondence to Nicholas Christenfeld, Department of Psychology 0109, University of California, San Diego, 9500 GUman Dr,, La JoUa, CA 92093; e-mail: nicko(@ucsd .edu, very different from these gut-wrenching dilemmas. Sometimes people select an item or course of action from a set of alternatives not only without another thought but also apparently without any thought at all. Although people can make choices without thinking about them in a variety of settings, one likely candidate, and the one that is investigated here, is when the alternatives are actually identical. For example, shoppers decide which can of tomato soup to buy, callers decide which phone booth to use, and writers decide which pencil to select without anything depending on these decisions. These are the kinds of decisions that the makers may not even realize they have made. The research on automaticity suggests that there is a wide range of things that people can do without conscious involvement (Posner & Snyder, 1975), Levelt (1989) has suggested that much of speech is produced without deliberation. The Stroop task is based on the fact that people seeing a word will read it automatically even if they try not to, Schank and Abelson's script theory (1977) and Langer's mindlessness (Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978) argue that a great deal of normal social interaction takes place without much conscious thought. This report examines whether there are systematic pattems in people's unthinking preferences. Much of the work on choices without consequences has focused on the blueseven phenomenon. The fact that people asked to pick a number tend to choose seven and asked to name their favorite color will come up with blue was noted by Simon (1971) and has since been extended to other countries (Phiibrick, 1976), other ages (Simon & Primavera, 1972), and other genders (Silver et al,, 1988), However, both colors and numbers are imbued with layers of significance that make interpreting these preferences very difficult. For example, blue being a favorite color could simply be a function of people's fondness for sunny days or ocean views, and the finding that few people pick zero (0,7% in the study by Silver et al,) may well be based on the connotations of that number. In both color and number choices, the alternatives are not equal. This report, in a series of six studies, examines choices between alternatives that do not have any values or connotations. STUDY 1: SUPERMARKETS