Summary of Eric J. Johnson's The Elements of Choice

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Eric J. Johnson's The Elements of Choice in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Going well beyond the familiar concepts of nudges and defaults, The Elements of Choice offers a comprehensive, systematic guide to creating effective choice architectures, the environments in which we make decisions. The designers of decisions need to consider all the elements involved in presenting a choice: how many options to offer, how to present those options, how to account for our natural cognitive shortcuts, and much more. These levers are unappreciated and we’re often unaware of just how much they influence our reasoning every day.

Eric J. Johnson is the lead researcher behind some of the most well-known and cited research on decision-making. He draws on his original studies and extensive work in business and public policy and synthesizes the latest research in the field to reveal how the structure of choices affects outcomes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Nov 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638157533

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Eric J. Johnson's The Elements of Choice

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The way choices are presented to us can change the decisions we make. The people who present those choices, the restaurant owner, your spouse, your doctor, your employer, are choice architects.

#2

The author was a student at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University, where he studied decision-making and decision-making design. He realized that people are inconsistent decision makers because of their limited cognitive abilities. Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that people use to make decisions.

#3

Choice architecture is the art of presenting people with multiple options and having them make a decision. It is done every day by decision makers who want their decisions to have an impact.

#4

Doctors spend a lot of time working with their hands, as they are constantly using electronic health records systems.

#5

Designers can also help doctors by simply changing the way they interface with the EHR. For example, by auto-correcting the name of the brand-name drug to the generic, the doctors are forced to remember the generic, which helps them choose the generic more often.

#6

A wide variety of choices can be overwhelming to the human brain, which is why defaults are so useful.

#7

Designers must choose the right number of options for a health care website, as well as what will be the default option. They must also decide what attributes to display, and how to present them.

#8

Your phone’s settings can have a huge impact on how a company makes money. In October 2020, the Justice Department and eleven states filed one of the largest antitrust cases in