Increase the Ratio of Positive Selections

Imagine a selection of options.

Like these investments:

• Stocks
• Mutual Funds

People distribute resources equally:

…[for] decision tasks in which people are called on to allocate a scarce resource (e.g., money, choices, belief) over a fixed set of possibilities (e.g., investment opportunities, consumption options, events)…they are biased toward even allocation (Fox et al., 2005, p. 338)

Investing $10k? You might invest $5k in stocks and $5k in mutual funds.

But if you see a third option — treasury bonds — your dispersion will be further diluted:

• $3.3k in stocks
• $3.3k in mutual funds
• $3.3k in bonds

Or consider two trays of food:

• Healthy
• Unhealthy

You can influence people to choose more healthy food by partitioning this category into more units:

• Healthy—Vegetables
• Healthy—Fruit
• Unhealthy

Now more healthy food will be chosen merely because of the larger ratio of options.

Follow this strategy for ratings or self-assessments. Provide a greater selection of positive ratings so that people are biased to rate positively and reinforce this attitude toward your brand.

For example, Netflix offers three ratings for their content:

• Not for me
• Like this
• Love this

Two ratings — Not for me and Love this — would cause more people to choose Not for me, leading them to infer that Netflix isn't as valuable as they believed because they keep disliking their content. And their middle rating — Like this — implies more positivity than a more realistic average like Meh.

• Fox, C. R., Bardolet, D., & Lieb, D. (2005). Partition dependence in decision analysis, resource allocation, and consumer choice. In Experimental business research (pp. 229-251). Springer, Boston, MA.