Decoy Effect

Just read an article over at The Old New Thing about the Decoy Effect.  Very interesting.  By adding a third choice, you can skew opinion towards one of two legitimate choices. 

You are asked to choose between A and B.  50% of people pick A, 50% pick B.  If you want to push people towards A, you can easily do this by adding a third choice C that is not as good as A or B.  Just make sure that choice A is better than C in more respects than B is.  People use choice C as the benchmark; they see that A is twice as better than C than B and therefore pick A more often. 

Keep an eye out for this kind of gaming in real life.  If I find any I'll post 'em here.

Bullshit Post by: McGurk at 04:27 PM | 2  Replies | Reply

And you included a bad URL just to see if anybody was paying attention, right?

1 Posted by Old Grouch on April 28, 2007 09:21 PM (GLhvz)

Actually, my very not-smart smiley code was blowing away the URL, changing b l o g s.microsoft.com to b l a r g s.microsoft.com.  C'est la guerre.

2 Posted by McGurk on April 28, 2007 10:50 PM (aowD0)

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