The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in business, marketing, sociology, decision-making, psychology, and related subjects.

The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters was written by Professor Eric J. Johnson. Professor Johnson teaches marketing at Columbia University where he is codirector of the Center for Decision Sciences (CDS) at the Columbia Business School.

As the CDS website explains, it

facilitates research and understanding on consumer behavior, the implications of decision making on public policy, and the neurological underpinnings of judgment and decision making.

TU students who are interested to learn more about CDS research may wish to find out about the center’s online studies program:

The center is continually recruiting people to participate in online studies. Recent studies have included completing interactive decision-making tasks, short cognitive tests, solving brain teasers, as well as answering questions about taking risks, the value of an improved environment and general questions about politics. In the future, the center plans to incorporate games that assess reaction time and other aspects of cognitive functioning. If you have specific questions about the studies we run, please contact us by e-mailing decision_sciences@columbia.edu

If selected to participate in a study, you can expect to be paid at the rate of about $16 USD/hour. (535 baht) Confidentiality is guaranteed in all research and your personal information will never be given or sold to any third party.

Choice is a noun referring to the psychological process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one of them. The TU Library owns several other books about different aspects of choice. 

Professor Johnson notes that while the general public generally criticized for the bad choices they make, from eating unhealthy foods to electing undeserving politicians, influencers can sometimes be at fault.

To guide consumers to making more informed choices, it is important to recall that people will generally prefer an option that offers the most easily available information that they can trust.

So, in earlier times, before doctors prescribed medications by using computer programs, they would often give patients expensive choices instead of more reasonably priced generic drugs because their names were easier to remember.

Most people do not believe they are being influenced even when it is clear that they are being influenced.

Even educating people about the way choices are constructed to ensure one result over another does not affect decision-making.

Making people aware that their decisions are being influenced does not change their decisions, but those who design the way choices are offered on websites, menus, health insurance advertisements and default settings for health matters can improve things.

Professor Johnson suggests to these designers of decisions: Design for others the way you want to be designed for… Choice architecture could be a particularly potent tool for addressing income disparity and social justice. On the flip side, this means that malevolent choice architecture, like the examples we have just discussed, are particularly harmful to those who are the most disadvantaged.

Here are some thoughts about choice by authors, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:

He that will not when he may,

When he will he shall have nay.

• Robert Burton, Anatomy of a Melancholy (1621), Part III. Sect. 2.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

• George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), Book VI, Chapter XLII.

Between the devil and the deep sea.

• Erasmus, Adagia, Chapter III.

Be they winners or losers, beggers should be no choosers.

• John Heywood’s Proverbs and Epigrams (1562)

He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

• Samuel Johnson, The Idler

Imagine a captain of a ship the moment a shift of direction must be made; then he may be able to say: I can do either this or that. But if he is not a mediocre captain he will also be aware that during all this the ship is ploughing ahead with its ordinary velocity, and thus there is but a single moment when it is inconsequential whether he does this or does that. So also with a person-if he forgets to take into account the velocity-there eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it, which also can be expressed by saying: Because others have chosen for him-or because he has lost himself.

• Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or II (1843)

Every person, if he so wills, can become a paradigmatic human being, not by brushing of his accidental qualities, but by remaining in them and ennobling them. He ennobles them by choosing them.

• Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II (1843)

We must now take precautions to prevent you from being embarrassed by something in which the ignorant majority is at fault for lack of proper consideration, and so from supposing with them, that man has not been created truly good simply because he is able to do evil. … If you reconsider this matter carefully and force your mind to apply a more acute understanding to it, it will be revealed to you that man’s status is better and higher for the very reason for which it is thought to be inferior: it is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory of the rational mind is based, it is in this that the whole honor of our nature consists, it is from this that its dignity is derived.

• Letter to Demetrias by Pelagius

Which of them shall I take?

Both? one? or neither? Neither can be enjoy’d,

If both remain alive.

• William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), Act V, scene 1

I will not choose what many men desire,

Because I will not jump with common spirits,

And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.

• William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (late 1590s), Act II, scene 9

There’s small choice in rotten apples.

• William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act I, scene 1

When conflicted between two choices, take neither.

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.

• Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon

Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare.

• Pierre Corneille, Héraclius

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay, Intellect.

For many are called, but few are chosen.

• The Bible, Matthew, XXII. 14.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

• George Moore, Bending of the Bough

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)