Does counting change what counts? Quantification fixation biases decision-making

Saw this posted on LinkedIn (forget who shared it) and found it really interesting. This study, across 21 experiments and 23k participants in managerial, policy and consumer contexts, studied how numbers and quantification distorts decision-making

Context:

·???????? Quantification is spreading and has reached into almost every personal and professional area

·???????? New-borns are given Apgar scores, bitterness from beer, sports, risk, everything

·???????? “The story of the 21st century may not just be about computers and the information age, but about the migration from the qualitative to the quantitative”

·???????? While for some people, “Numbers are pallid and hard to process”, creating a disadvantage, for others it can be an advantage, as it creates a more readily perceivable comparison;

·???????? e.g. “Quantification will powerfully sway us here because numbers are exactly suited for comparison”, and can be judged, compared, subtracted, added etc

·???????? They argue that when decisions require tradeoffs, people mat experience a higher comparison fluency in cognitive processing when choices are presented as numbers over non-numbers

·???????? They call this effect ‘quantification fixation’

·???????? Quantification fixation may infest in many ways, like choosing a job candidate based on their GPA instead of somebody else with more relevant wok experience, or when selecting a restaurant that has a lower average cost but is noisier or less suitable, because the online ratings are readily comparable, or choosing health insurance based on a lower monthly cost even though it’s far less suitable

·???????? They argue that “quantification fixation is mediated by people’s perception that quantified information is more fluent and facilitates more fluent comparisons than qualitative information”

·???????? And “Decision-makers feel more confident and comfortable relying on numbers, and this feeling mediates the degree of quantification fixation”

[** Quantification fixation may also partially explain the dominance of injury metrics – we have a higher comparison fluency for these data over more rich, but qualitative intel; or perhaps decisions within risk matrices]

Results:

Key findings:

·???????? “people systematically shift their preferences toward options that dominate on tradeoff dimensions conveyed numerically”

·???????? “findings suggest that when we count, we change what counts”

·???????? “numbers are encoded and recalled marginally more successfully than non-numbers, which may contribute to quantification fixation”

·???????? A key implication of our findings is that when making decisions, people are systematically biased to favor options that dominate on quantified dimensions”

·???????? “And tradeoffs that pit quantitative against qualitative information are everywhere”

They say that such comparisons are everywhere in society. For instance, you can find websites facilitating comparisons of options using a mix of quantified and non-quantified attributes – e.g. price, star ratings. Or with selecting a course of surgery, or workplace related options.

When people face decisions involving tradeoffs between qualitative and quantitative attributes, “people privilege the quantitative, favoring different job candidates, projects, and char ities based on which option is more attractive” on numerical dimensions.

These effects were found to persist across managerial, policy and consumer choices across different settings.

They also showed that quantification fixation had “financial consequences, emerging even when cash rewards are on the line”.

They find that quantifying certain choices can have “important repercussions for how decisions are made”. I think we can imagine the ways the choices are framed in safety planning, risk assessment, and safety metrics could then influence and skew decisions.

They found that when the numeric information was “relatively disfluent”, people were less likely to bias quantification. Also, people more fluent with numbers were more susceptible to quantification fixation.

In all, “these findings suggest that quantification fixation is driven by people’s comparison fluency with numeric tradeoff”.

I think we can all imagine how this relates to the use of injury measures and decisions...

Ref: Chang, L. W., Kirgios, E. L., Mullainathan, S., & Milkman, K. L. (2024). Does counting change what counts? Quantification fixation biases decision-making.?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,?121(46), e2400215121.