Chang said she’s not surprised by the influence numbers have on behavioral decision-making, but what stands out to her is the robustness of the effect, which was replicated across 21 experiments involving 23,000 randomly selected participants. Despite the significant sample size, the predilection for numbers never wavered, except when numbers were presented in ways that were harder to process. Chang and her co-authors describe the mechanism underlying quantification fixation as “comparison fluency,” or the ease of judging numerical values compared with non-numbers, such as words and pictures.
“How Numbers Drive Behavioral Decision-making“
Katherine Milkman, one of the coauthors, is a scholar I follow pretty closely, and this article seems pretty insightful and I’ll be reading the research this week. Our field has some difficulty here, none no more so in the mixed legacy of Deming on the subject, mostly misinterpretations if you ask me. Mark Graban wrote a great post on that last year.
Investigations of a Dog 