You Are What You Choose: The Habits of Mind That Really Determine How We Make Decisions

In this book Scott De Marchi and James T. Hamilton, two Duke University professors, offer a new and ingenious way to examine and predict how people make decisions. People, whether rational or irrational, approach choice in different ways. Their choices they argue, are not understandable unless you know who and what the people are. To a large degree how you choose, they posit, matters more than what you are choosing. To approach the problem, the two Duke Professors, offer their TRAITS model: * Time * Risk * Altruism * Information * meToo * Stickiness. Interpreting data from more than 30,000 subjects, the authors show decision makers stick with their entrenched habits of mind and are consistent about how much information they gather before opting for a choice.

I liked it, read it very quickly. A very nice light touch with a simple but important point: There is a ton of data available on consumption that is analyzed all the time by the usual suspects. Mostly these people just look for correlations which they then explain post hoc and then sell books and consulting based on what they've found. de Marchi and Hamilton look at the same data but focusing on correlations related to how consumers make decisions. This can then be exploited for fun, profit and world domination. A couple of questions: 1) Psych folks must obsess over this stuff constantly, but I don't see anything in the book that indicates that those fields were consulted. There has to be at least one honest scientist over there who could help improve the model. 2) Why such a short survey? For instance, I know that the appearance of clothes and house are important to success as widely perceived, but they're not important to success as defined by me. Should my meToo be higher or lower with this in mind? A longer survey might be more precise. I highly recommend this very useful and entertaining book.

Professor de Marchi is the man, a great teacher, and I enjoyed his and Hamilton's book. Good for a quick read: the correlates they found between different suites of preferences are very interesting. My mom is into these pop psychology books so she kiped my copy, but I'm happy to buy another copy to funnel more royalties to Scott. Hopefully enough marketing folks catch onto this book that de Marchi can construct his own dojo, viz [...]

In today's marketplace there exists a real glut of books that examine the ways in which people make decisions - Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide; Richard Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness; Zachary Shore, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions [BLUNDER -OS]; Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking; Ori Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior; etc. This book is different. As the authors explain, "What these and other books on marketing and decision making do not explore, however, is how individuals vary systematically in the way they approach decisions across many aspects of their lives. For example, people who are willing to accept risks in products and revisit their purchase decisions are also more likely to do the same in politics, and therefore call themselves independents. A main contribution of the TRAITS model is to show how a person's decision-making habits stay the same across different types of choices. This means that data on how you make decisions as a neighbor and voter can be used to predict your life as a consumer." So, what is the TRAITS model? 'TRAITS' stands for the "six core habits of mind that affect how you make decisions in all areas of your life." T=Time, R=Risk, A=Altruism, I=Information, T=meToo and S=Stickiness. Included in the Appendix is a brief self-survey, which you can use to score yourself and determine how you routinely make decisions (For example, my score looks like this: T=-1, R=-5,A=-1, I=+5, T=+1, S=+1). The authors state that, "...TRAITS are like a Myers-Briggs personality test for how people choose. In the following chapters, we will explore the relationship between these TRAITS and many different types of decisions. We will also examine why some people make better choices than others, have an easier time learning from experience, and may act more like investors than consumers when the personal costs of living out their worldview become high." Also, "As we will see here and in sub-sequent chapters, our TRAITS model helps explain seemingly unrelated choices. To a large degree, how you choose (i.e., what type of decision maker you are) matters more than what you are choosing." One important point that De Marchi and Hamilton make early on in this book is that whether one takes the view that people are rational (ex. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) or The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World), or irrational (ex. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions or The Mind of the Market: How Biology and Psychology Shape Our Economic Lives), in many respects both views are useless because neither view has any predictive value. Their view is simple: "We believe that habits of mind that people use to make decisions are essentially the same across many different types of choices, reflecting what they value and how they reach decisions." And in thi

A fascinating new approach to decision making made accessible to both the marketers and the marketed. The book is entertaining throughout with thought provoking analysis of decisions that everyone has made at some time or another. The authors break the mold of conventional survey data mining by also digging through google, twitter, and online political donation records to evaluate whether their model of human behavior is an accurate predictor in the new frontier. In the end, the examples of choices projected onto the underlying bases the authors have proposed leave the consumer ready to breakdown their decisions for themselves. Don't leave your choices up to the advertisers - read this book!