Q&A

You have found that people don’t always have well-defined preferences—and that we often ‘make up the rules’ for a decision on the spot. Describe how this works.

When people make choices, they don’t simply refer to a ‘master list’ of preferences in their memory, or some preexisting choice algorithm. They use a wide variety of approaches and rules-of-thumb — and my colleagues and I found that these are often developed on the spot. We came up with the ‘constructive process view’ of decision making, which states that individuals often build strategies opportunistically, changing their processing on the spot depending upon the information they encounter during the course of solving the decision problem.

At the time, we realized that, if people are making things up as they go along, and if — as many studies had shown — the information that is most salient or noticeable in an environment is what gets people’s attention, these are very significant findings for marketers. There are endless ways to embrace these insights, whether it means that you make part of your message appear