Decision Making and Emotions-Review
What Decisions Do You Want Your Users To Make On Your Website?
When you understand the cognitive processes that shape decision making, you’ll find better and more useful answers. The ability to identify and understand the decisions users make on your site is a potent tool.
Excerpt: Decision making and Emotions – CXL Institute
This week’s psychology and persuasion review article is about emotions and decision making. Every moment that we are awake, we are inundated with opportunities to make decisions. The quality of these decisions will be dependent upon some level of emotion.
According to the CXL Institute there’re factors linked to decision making. The lessons I have learned this week on the decision making will ultimately help me and my customers in designing and writing better web content for marketing purposes.
The overall material presentation of the course lessons in this section of the minidegree is too academic for most folks. For someone who has never studied psychology as a course, they are likely to find the lessons on the hard side. It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted!
What Factors Influence Decision Making
Firstly, I have just learned that an adult person makes about 35,000 decisions each day. Sometimes I wonder how these figures are arrived at. But of course, I can’t dispute the figures as this is not my area of expertise.
Alright. Back to the factors influencing decision making. What are they? Before we get into that, it’s important to understand the many variables that must be studied or indeed examined so as to arrive at the said factors of influence.
Remember that I have already mentioned that this is very hard material presented in this course. This is college degree stuff. The instructors in these course lessons completely overlooked the fact that not everyone is prepared for college study as they learn these optimization and marketing lessons.
It will help a wider number of people if the lessons were somewhat re-aligned in a more palatable language without necessarily diluting the content. Perhaps the course designers can look into this?
Back to those factors. How do they firstly influence your website design and content presentation? What decisions do you want your site users to make? How can you make each decision easier for them to make?
Some of the factors which influence decision making among others include the following;
- belief in personal relevance
- past experiences
- individual differences and age
- level of personal commitment
These are only a few among many others. But there are 4 key factors which I would like to mention here now.
Now, the:
The 4 Factors Which Influence Decision Making
Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.
Dan Ariely
What decisions are you confronted with every time you are awake? Here are a few of them.
- what to have for dinner
- what clothes to wear
- where to go for your next vacation
Psychologists now understand the following are the main decision makers. To a very large extent decisions are based much more on emotions than rational behavior.
Here is an extract taken directly from the CXL Institute:
- Cognitive Biases – are systematic errors in thinking that affect the decision and judgments people make. Sometimes these biases are related to memory. Some of these include belief biases (the over-dependence on prior knowledge in arriving at decisions), omission biases (people tend to omit information that’s perceived as risky), and confirmation bias (people observe what they expect in observations). We’ll cover biases in depth later in the program.
- Memories – Past experiences can impact future decision making. Studies have shown that when something positive results from a decision, people are more likely to decide in a similar way, given a similar situation. In contrast, people tend to avoid repeating past mistakes.
- Reason – abductive reasoning is based on creating and testing hypotheses using the best information available. This kind of reasoning produces the kind of daily decision-making that works best with the information present, which often is incomplete
- Emotions – Decisions are emotional. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a discovery when he studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions were generated. He found that they seemed normal, with the exception of not being able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make a decision. They could explain the logic, but struggled when asked to make simple decisions, like what to eat. This is because decisions are based on emotion.
So what has all this got to do with how your present your website to your users?
From what I have gathered so far in this emotions and decision making lesson, when you learn how to effectively measure attention, memory and emotions, it will go a long way in implementing better ways to optimize your campaigns, landing pages and the your website copy and content.
Ultimately it comes down to this. The success of your website, landing page or indeed your campaigns will be determined by the way you present your assets to help your users to make the decisions that will aid your sales process. Again there are many factors that come into play.
We must give thanks to the scientific and psychology research which is now making it possible for the marketers to use these studies to better target their audiences. In the past this was not really a critical factor. But with the coming of the digital marketing these factors can no longer be ignored.
For every business owner who desires to see sustained market growth, it is important to acquire the relevant skills. Whether for themselves or for the teams in the business, conversion and optimization skills are a must learn.
More and more business is now happening online. It is important, therefore, that a business owner develops skills and strategies that will help in the user’s decision making experiences. when they interact with digital assets presented to them. This of course is all part of understanding your target audience.