The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton

Book of the Week: 22 April 2018

In 1990 … Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist at Stanford University … split participants into two groups: tappers and listeners. The first group chose a song and then, without revealing its name, they tapped out the rhythm for the listeners to guess. The tappers estimated the probability of the song being recognised at 50%. They were wildly wrong. Of the 120 songs in the experiment on 2.5% were identified correctly. What causes the gap between prediction and reality? Well, when the tapper beats out their tune they can’t help but hear the song play through their head. However, all the listener hears, in the words of the psychologist Chip Heath, ‘is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code’.

This is an example of how we fall victim to ‘the curse of knowledge’ and find it difficult to imagine not knowing something that we know.

The Choice Factory has 25 short chapters that relate a named behavioural bias to fictional incidents in a working day. Each one is illuminated by academic case studies that provide evidence along with suggestions for practical applications. Richard Shotton’s approach is conversational and accessible rather than ‘dry textbook’ and it is a book that can be dipped in and out of because each chapter is self-contained. A fascinating book for anyone who studies business, marketing or behavioural economics but psychology students, and anyone interested in how we make consumer choices, will find it an entertaining read.