The Psychology of Consumer Choice
By Nancy Moffitt
Wharton’s Mary Frances Luce
Sheds Light on the Decisions We Make
– and The Role Our Emotions Play
Imagine going to the doctor for your
annual physical, including the usual
battery of screening tests your physician
recommends each year. You think
nothing of it all – it’s familiar territory
– and when you leave the office your
mind is onto other matters of the day.
But a week later, you receive an
unexpected phone call: your results
have come back, and they reveal something
suspicious. Anxious and full of
questions, you return to the hospital for
another round of testing, and once
again wait for your results. After a week
of worrying, the doctor calls to tell you
that everything appears to be normal
after all, and suggests you simply return
next again year for the same routine
testing.
Crisis averted, no harm, no foul?
Or do you now feel more – or less –
vulnerable? Will you respond the same
way, quickly dashing in for follow-up
testing, the next time you get an unexpected
phone call from your doctor?
Wharton’s Mary Frances Luce explores
these questions and others that
probe the psychology of consumer decision
making. Luce, associate professor
of marketing, has broken new ground
in her examination of a previously
ignored area of consumer behavior:
how decisions – from pursuing medical
testing to buying a car – are affected
by emotion, especially negative
emotion.
Luce, 32, earned her PhD at Duke
University, noted for its research on the
behavioral aspects of decision making.
The implications of such investigation
are obvious: predicting consumer
action and choice. But most research
on decision making has taken a somewhat
clinical view of how and why people
pick one item or course of action
over another, looking at decisions as
little more than problem-solving exercises
or herd mentality.
Luce has taken a different view,
however, and her research has borne out
her hunches. In a variety of contexts
and through a number of experiments,
Luce has demonstrated that our choices
change – sometimes dramatically – if
we are faced with aspects of a decision
that frighten or upset us.
Her research on how people respond
to medical test results, co-authored with
Wharton’s Barbara Kahn and published
last year in the Journal of Consumer
Research , revealed that initially suspicious
test results that ultimately show
no disease – often called false positives
– increase a patient’s feeling of vulnerability
and can influence later decisions
to get re-tested.
In their paper, Luce and Kahn note
that a focus on saving lives through
early diagnosis has resulted in a proliferation
of medical tests today, from pap
smears to mammograms, blood tests for
prostate cancer and sexually transmitted
disease screening. Thus, today’s consumers
are faced with a barrage of suggested
screening tests and frequently
must decide whether to engage in
repeated screening tests after a suspicious
test result.
And there’s little doubt that not finding
a malady ultimately costs more than
follow-up tests. As a result, most medical
screening tests are hyper-sensitive
by design, flagging suspicious results
roughly 15 to 20 percent of the time for
mammograms, for instance, when only
2 to 6 percent of those ultimately lead
to a breast cancer diagnosis.
Luce and Kahn write that the costs of
not diagnosing an illness are obvious: a
disease cannot be treated if it is not
detected. But what about the psychological
costs to patients who are
informed of a suspicious test result and
undergo follow-up testing, only to be
told that they are healthy, after all? In a
variety of research writings, physicians
have for years expressed worry about
the emotional trauma to patients and
subsequent effects on their decisions to
seek further medical testing. But prior
to Luce and Kahn’s paper, no experimental
research on the subject had
taken place.
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