Mini Episode 4 - Why do I keep ordering the same burrito?

Adam from Bondi wants to know why he cant say no to that bur-ri-to.

Dan:                             00:17                Yo, and welcome to Bad Decisions, mini episode four. I'm your host, Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat. Now just a quick little reminder, these mini eps we're doing while Dr. Mel’s away with baby Layla. I am doing my best to get through all of these weird and wonderful questions that we've received over the years. Today we have a real doozy. This one has given me real lockdown vibes, so let's go to today's question.

Adam:                          00:41                Hey, it's Adam from Bondi here. I love your show. I've got a question for you. I have a lot of trouble when choosing a meal on Uber Eats. I don't know what to order, and I always end up going to the same burrito. Do you know why that is?

Dan:                             00:57                Right. Yeah. Adam, I really, really feel you on this one. At the moment we're in day 200 and something lock down of Melbourne. I'm doing a lot of ordering off the food apps and somewhere around day 50 of lockdown, I found this amazing chicken salad that I'm now ordering literally three or four days every single week. It has just become my go-to. I'm feeling you. Yours is a burrito, mine's the chicken salad, but I think we're dealing with the same thing here. Now what's weird, especially weird about this one is we all know that variety is, or at least it's meant to be, the spice of life. Today, from a food perspective, especially from a lunch perspective, we have more variety than we could ever hope to have imagined for. Any one of these food apps, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, DoorDash, each one must have hundreds, if not thousands of choices, and there's three or four different apps that you can be choosing from.

Dan:                             01:48                This should be a veritable smorgasbord, or even an actual smorgasbord for us to be making different selections from for our lunches every day. Strangely we seem to go for the same thing over and over and over again. If we look to conventional wisdom, which we can do from time to time with caution, it does suggest that we should love choice. The more options we have the better. This makes sense, right, because choice makes us feel powerful. It makes us feel in control, and the power of an individual to choose is really at the core of our modern democratic brand field capitalist society. Beyond that, I mean, as market, we are literally the Navy seals of capitalism. We dedicate our lives or at least our livelihoods to giving people more and more choices to choose from. It seems weird that you and me, Adam, seem to just keep picking the same damn thing for lunch every single day.

Dan:                             02:38                What we can attribute this to is something called the choice paradox, which refers to our tendency to love the idea of having choice, but become quickly overwhelmed when it's time to choose. The reality is that our small, fairly primitive brains are just not very well equipped to deal with all of the choices and all of the options that we might need to make in any given day. Should I get out of bed or should I not get out of bed? Should I have toast or should I have cereal? Should I wear gray sweat pants or black sweat pants? Well, I'm on Zoom all day so nobody notices anyway, but there's still choices that we need to make. Often what we do when we're faced with too much choice is just to pick the easiest thing that we can, and more often than not, that is the thing that we ordered the last 15 times that didn't kill us. Right?

Dan:                             03:20                It might not be the best burrito or the best chicken salad in the world, but we've had it before, we know it's safe, and we can really save a lot of cognitive processing power if we just go with that again. The choice paradox is beautifully demonstrated in the famous fancy jams study of the year 2000 in which psychologists, Iyengar and Lepper, tested the impact of giving people more choice on conversion rates. Now what these guys did was they set up in a fancy supermarket on back-to-back weekends, and on each time they set up, they had a little table set up with different jams for people to come and sample. When somebody sampled a jam they would then give them a coupon to go and get a discount on the jam if they decided to buy it, which beautifully let them test (1) what proportion of people did we give coupons to, and (2) how many of those are actually redeemed for purchases?

Dan:                             04:04                The first week they set up six different jams for people to come and sample. They had a wonderful 40% sampling rate. Of those 40% of people that stopped for a sample, 30% actually went on to buy. Pretty good, I would say. The next week they set up in the same supermarket on the same table, maybe slightly extended because this time they were showcasing 24 different types of jams for people to choose. What did we see? Well, we saw 60% of people now stop for a sample, which is a pretty good bump in sampling rates, but only 3% of them went on to purchase. Something happened between jam seven and jam 24 where we just exploded people's brains, and thinking about jam too much just became too difficult, and they moved on without it.

Dan:                             04:49                Now, you still need to choose something for lunch. Right? You can't just walk away. You're going to get very angry and very hungry by 3:00 PM, so it makes sense that we would just pick the simplest thing we can, the default option, the thing that we've had before, the thing that we know we like. Click the button, we get on with our day. What we can learn from this is that often less choice is actually better than more. Despite what our instincts and often textbooks tell us, giving people fewer but better choices will actually make our conversion rate better and make people happier with what they ultimately choose. Adam, if you are looking for a little hack or a little way around this, one thing I can recommend is you can give yourself a rule where say one day a week, let's say on a Friday, you are not allowed to order the safe and lovable burrito. You're going to push yourself a little bit. Maybe the Hawaiian burrito, or maybe go wild and order something completely off menu, but that'll at least force yourself to experience something new. Who knows, you might find a new family favorite.

Dan:                             05:42                That is all for today on the choice paradox. If you have other questions about the weird and wonderful things that you see others do, or that you've seen yourself do, you can hit me up at askdan@hardhat.com.au or all over the internet at Dan Monheit. We'll catch you next time. Peace out.