feel the pain: how conflict influences decision-making
Human beings are tasked with making hundreds of choices and decisions daily. Some are relatively simple — Do I want soup or salad for lunch? Should I wear the white shirt or the blue one? But others are so fraught with complications that decision-making can draw out for many restless days and nights.
Rom Y. Schrift, a marketing professor at Wharton, studied the complexities of decision-making in his latest research, “Pain and Preferences: Observed Decisional Conflict and the Convergence of Preferences.” The paper was co-authored with Moty Amar, a professor at Ono Academic College in Israel, and recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The results are a revealing look at how the pain of others struggling with the agony of decision-making can influence our own process. The more empathetic a person is, the more likely they will identify with the conflicted decision-maker and select a similar choice. The study yields important information about human behavior that can be used across a broad spectrum of disciplines.