Proud and grateful to have worked on this with superstars🌟👑 @erikakirgios.bsky.social , @sendhil.bsky.social, and @katymilkman.bsky.social.

Interestingly, people who report being more comfortable with numbers are more likely to show this pattern. The more ease and confidence you have with numbers, the more they might sway you!

Why does this happen? Numbers are more comparison fluent: it feels easier and more intuitive to compare numeric than non-numeric information. When numerical information becomes harder to process, people are less susceptible to quantification fixation.

People tend to shift their preferences to favor whichever option dominates on the numeric dimension, a tendency we dub ‘quantification fixation’. In other words, when we count, we change what counts.

As a society, we increasingly rely on metrics and ratings to describe our experiences. When facing such tradeoffs, our work shows that it really matters if some dimensions of a choice are quantified and others are not.