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All too often, I, like all too many Americans, will walk into a fast food joint. As is well known, the fast food industry has, for a good number of years now, been pushing combination meals — a single order will purchase a main course (classically, burger), a side order (fries) and a drink (coke). As is also well known (pdf), people respond to cues like this in judging how much to consume — if something is packaged as a meal, we process it as a meal. (In case that link doesn’t work, it’s to Brian Wansink & Koert van Ittersum, "Portion Size Me: Downsizing Our Consumption Norms" Journal of the American Dietetic Association 107:1103-1106 (2007).)
All this stuff is old news. But, I wouldn’t expect myself to fall for it (which is the point of this post: I did). I’m a pretty cynical and suspicious guy, a cynicism and suspicion that rises to almost downright paranoia when it comes to marketing. (I’ve been known to heavily discount a health threat the moment someone starts selling a product to protect against it, for example.) I flatter myself by thinking I’m somewhat intelligent. And I’m well aware of the above research.
Yet every few weeks until today, I’d walk into a Taco Bell and order one of those combo meals. This is so even though I often don’t particularly want one of the items on the combo — I’m usually fairly indifferent between, say, having a soda and just drinking water. Since water’s free and soda isn’t, rationally, I should just drink water every time. So why do I order the combo meal? Well, it’s in a combo meal — presumably, it’s cheaper than buying the items separately. I’m saving money!* Or, at least, this is the rationalization my brain would supply, on a level just below consciousness except on those rare, fleeting, and unproductive moments when I’d bother to think before ordering.**
Recently, in order to live a little healthier, I made a firm decision to stop consuming sodas. So it was actually easy to figure out how much I was "saving" by ordering the combo meal instead of all three items.***
Guess how much I saved. Go ahead. Guess. In the comments, even, if you want (status points to the first person who gets it right). Highlight the space between the brackets to see, after you’ve guessed.
[Combo meal savings over ordering all three items separately: $0.08. Extra combo meal cost over ordering just the two items I wanted: $1.61]
I fell for this kind of stupidity even though I know the research. Do you?
I really think this bears emphasis. I know this research really well, and I have known it for over a decade. If they can get me, they can get anyone. Everyone, even serious experts, even the guy who largely invented the study of these common biases, can fall prey to this kind of thing. Dare you think you’re exempt?
Do you think maybe this contributes to our obesity problem? Or do you still think that overeating can casually be described as a "free choice" for which people are personally responsible? (While Taco Bell profits from selling unwanted sodas…)
Policy message: if even informed people can be suckered like this, maybe it is time for a legislative solution?
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* Even if this were true, one isn’t saving money if one buys something one doesn’t actually want, in order to get it at a discount! There’s another sinister anchoring effect at work: one’s comparison case becomes "buying all three items at full price," not "buying only the two items one wants" (which is invariably cheaper than buying all three).
** That is, I’d basically process sodas as free because of the imagined "combo meal discount", and hence be indifferent between them and water, even though it’s actually more expensive. Then, ordering the combo meal is the path of least resistance.
*** That’s not so easy to do unless you actually order the items individually and compare: not all the prices for individual items show up on the menu. Fortunately, the sodas do, so I could add the price of a soda to what I paid for the other two items and thereby learn the non-combo price for the three items.
Bias in Real Life: A Personal Story
Adding a data point:I bought a combo meal at Burger King today. The receipt had the combo meal discount printed on it ($0.85). I submit that normal market forces can bring information to consumers who have difficulty remembering to add three numbers.
(The combo meal discount was static, no matter what size of combo you order. That is, you could increase the fries and soda by one size for $0.50 or two for $1.00. The non-combo cost of a large fry+large soda is $0.50 more than the medium, and the king-sized (or whatever they call it) is another $0.50. I did not test whether I could increase the size of the fries without increasing the size of the soda and still get the combo discount. Based on the receipt, that seems possible.)
@ConstantThanks for the clean reply! I pointed out your analogy as flawed given that fast food items and newspapers are simply not similar in any but the most superficial way. Especially as you had exploited that small similarity to build an argument around the clear irrationality of dismantling newspapers or of selling food by ingredient, insinuating that doing so would be nonsensical and that one must follow from the other: that the suggestion regarding oversight of product bundling was silly because you wouldn't do that to a newspaper/where would it stop, and that it would end badly.
Unfortunately, this is simply a logical slippery slope and thus fallacious rationality.
As mentioned before, there is an understood and clear difference between passing yourself off as someone you aren't in order to spy on and emotionally manipulate/injure someone by exploiting the foibles of human nature to alter their judgement and response (for example, the Megan Meiers case), and your wife using the same to make you feel like an ass for giving weird Uncle Henry the cold shoulder at the family get together. I bring up this seemingly unconnected idea because the type of counterargument you chose in making the above counter would be akin to arguing that "you can't legislate manipulation because then either all cons are just fine or all social manipulation is wrong".
Your argument itself is a fallacy, as your argument is "either X or Y" -- a black and white claim -- when there is clearly a significant gray area involving acceptable and unacceptable manipulation, and rational and irrational ways to deal with such, including legislation that makes some forms of the behavior illegal while not creating a ridiculous police-state situation.
Similarly, arguing that newspapers need to be dismantled into sections or stories because fast food bundles utilize some well-understood presentation tricks to get you to purchase without consideration and that behavior might be corrected, as an argument, is missing both this sort of perspective and scale.
So newspapers and fast food is apples and oranges: one obvious difference being that newspapers aren't trying to get you to "buy more" instead, or relying on presentational grouping or social-linguistic cues to influence your perception of what it is you are buying and the value of such (ie: suggesting the items are a "meal" and presenting them as such to increase profit via suggestion of the nature of what is being purchased, when a burger alone could be a "meal", and given the detrimental nature of both the consumerism the "meal" inspires and the impact on the physical health of a society caused by such).
Paul goes into most of this and more in his own response, so I won't reiterate.
The point was: the analogy upon which your argument rests was false, which did not necessarily invalidate your points as such, but the false dilemma you proposed in the argument stemming from that analogy did.