Quantify Your Advantages

Everything is quantified nowadays.

We measure:

• Movies by Rotten Tomatoes.
• Websites by Domain Authority.
• Babies by Apgar scores.

Dubbed quantification fixation, this focus on numbers has created an instinctive preference for numerical superiority. Even if these options are worse overall.

For example, customers prefer hotels that are superior on whichever metric — price or quality — is quantified. And researchers replicated this effect across 21 scenarios (Chang et al., 2024).

Ultimately, you can influence behavior by quantifying advantages. Some governments encourage healthy eating by quantifying food healthiness, like Nutri-Score ratings:

Perhaps catalogs should replace a visual continuum of stars with a single digit, like Airbnb:

A single digit will intensify a preference for quality (and typically higher prices).

Or you can curb harmful behaviors by restricting quantification. Perhaps social media companies should depict engagement visually instead of quantitatively:

Visual approaches can still convey the amount of engagement, yet this UI tweak might improve the mental health for billions of people by removing a key culprit in unhealthy comparisons — i.e., digits.

The authors said it best: When we count, we change what counts (Chang et al., 2024).

How to Apply

• Invent an Industry Metric. Is your bread softer than competitors? Show a softness score. Or any metric that aligns with your competitive advantage (e.g., crispiness, tastiness; Hsee et al., 2009).
• Show Unit Prices. You can nudge customers from a 4-pack of batteries to a 20-pack by showing the unit prices in which $0.70/battery is numerically cheaper than $1.20/battery (Yao & Oppewal, 2016).
• Write Precise Numbers for Accuracy. Round numbers feel vague and abstract. A project that takes 1 year seems like it could be delayed, compared to a project that takes 52 weeks (Zhang & Schwarz, 2012).

• Chang, L. W., Kirgios, E. L., Mullainathan, S., & Milkman, K. L. (2024). Does counting change what counts? Quantification fixation biases decision-making. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(46), e2400215121.
• Hsee, C. K., Yang, Y., Gu, Y., & Chen, J. (2009). Specification seeking: How product specifications influence consumer preference. Journal of consumer research, 35(6), 952-966.
• Yao, J., & Oppewal, H. (2016). Unit pricing increases price sensitivity even when products are of identical size. Journal of Retailing, 92(1), 109-121.
• Zhang, Y. C., & Schwarz, N. (2012). How and why 1 year differs from 365 days: A conversational logic analysis of inferences from the granularity of quantitative expressions. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 248-259.