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Does counting change what counts? Quantification fixation biases decision-making

Linda W Chang,Erika L. Kirgios,Sendhil Mullainathan,Katherine L. Milkman

Published 2024 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

Significance Across 21 experiments with over 23,000 participants in managerial, policy, and consumer contexts, we identify a critical distortion that shapes how people make decisions involving tradeoffs across qualitative and quantitative attributes. When making hiring, donation, and policy decisions, people tend to privilege quantitative information, favoring options that dominate on the dimension described numerically. This “quantification fixation” is driven by the perception that numbers are easier to use for comparative decision-making; people who are more comfortable with numbers—those higher in subjective numeracy—are more likely to exhibit quantification fixation. As quantification becomes increasingly prevalent, the comparison fluency of numbers may systematically skew decisions. These findings suggest that quantifying certain choice features can have important repercussions for how decisions are made.

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