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#1: Users feel that group decisions are harder than individual decisions

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• Adrian #1: Interviewee struggles to make group decisions, but is usually capable of making decisions for themselves

• Adrian #2: "It's hard to make group decisions because you have to think about what everyone likes."

• Adrian #3: "I feel bad when 9 people want to go to a place but 1 person doesn't enjoy going there."​

• Juyeon #1: Interviewee finds making dinner plans with others hard because they try to consider what is easiest for everyone

• Ray #1: Interviewee feels that in larger groups there are more differences of personalities making it hard to agree

• Saalim #1: Interviewee states that group decisions are hard because you need to account for different preferences

• Ian #1: Interviewee tries to please others and doesn’t want to be the one to make the decision in case it makes anyone unhappy

• Article: “Biases emanating from social influential factors (i.e. groupthink, group polarization and group escalation of commitment) would appear to be, not surprisingly, highly relevant for decision-making made at higher levels of the organization on issues of strategy or planning.” (Social Biases in Team Decision Making)

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#2: Users enjoy feedback on their decision making, preferably from friends and family

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• Adrian #1: Interviewee says they only ask close friends and family for input because they trust their opinions

• Adrian #2: Interviewee says they only ask close friends and family for their input.

  • "I ask close friends because I can trust them to offer good judgment on things and to be respectable about it."

  • "[My older sisters] support me. They have experience. And they see the long term. I'm only focused on this year. They are looking at my next five years."

  • "I know what my friends like. So I can guess if I'll like the food if they like the food. I don't know people on Yelp. Someone might like this dish but maybe it's because they're vegan."

• Adrian #3: "It's easier to ask [a close friend] because we've known each other for a long time. I don't need to explain the context because he already knows it."

  • "Even though he's a friend, he doesn't go, 'I'm your friend…' He tells the honest truth.:

• Juyeon #1: Interviewee found that when they went to their family for feedback on graduating early or not, they received mixed feedback, but it was all helpful

• Aliyah #1: Interviewee find critical thinking and new perspectives helpful in decision making. They don’t like it when people don’t give feedback on their choices.

• Saalim #1: Interviewee states that it is harder to make decisions without asking others for input. They tend to ask friends and not anonymous people. They are reluctant to offer their own input on others' decisions, but willing to in the case of friends.

• Ian #1: Interviewee says that they feel people who lack self confidence may need input from others to validate their choices.

• Article: “An individual's susceptibility to the framing effect was modulated by the valence of the social feedback (SFB), but only when the feedback provider was a close friend. This effect was reflected in the activation patterns of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, regions involved in complex decision-making. Taken together, these results highlight social closeness as an important factor in understanding the impact of SFB on neural mechanisms of decision-making.” (Social closeness and feedback modulate susceptibility to the framing effect )

 

#3: When users lack time, they tend to omit reasoning and go with their gut

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• Adrian #1: Interviewee says that they normally default to a decision when time runs out.

• Adrian #2: "Usually we keep going, 'Where do you wanna eat… where do you wanna eat…" and have to choose something because we're taking too long.

  • "If there's a safe choice, we just go with that."

• Adrian #3: "We usually just pick something because we're running out of time."

• Juyeon #1: Interviewee says that they often run out of time due to indecisiveness which leads to bad decisions.

• Saalim #1: Interviewee goes with their gut instinct when they run out of time, but if they have time they try to think of the consequences of decisions before deciding.

• Article: “Results indicate that focusing on feelings versus details led to superior objective and subjective decision quality for complex decisions.These results suggest that affective decision strategies may be more effective relative to deliberative strategies for certain complex decisions.” (Should I go with my gut? Investigating the benefits of emotion-focused decision making.)

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#4: Users like to know the outcome of their decisions so they can gauge which one they prefer, not knowing the outcome makes them indecisive

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• Ray #1: Interviewee always considers the pros and cons when making decisions

• Juyeon #1: Interviewee considers “what when where” factors related to the decisions and tries to calculate the outcomes of their decisions for the best results. They get frustrated when they get unwanted results. They also consider things like whether they want a change of diet or not when deciding on food if they already ate the same thing that week.

• Aliyah #1: Interviewee tries to predict the outcomes of their decisions

• Saalim #1: Interviewee considers outcomes of their decisions.

• Article: “The hypothesis that indecisiveness may cause inertia in choice under uncertainty is the core of Knightian Decision Theory (Bewley, 2002) (henceforth, KDT). This theory is based on the premise that ambiguity might induce an incomplete preference. This premise implies that an individual may be indecisive when she does not know the probability distributions over outcomes. KDT predicts that an indecisive individual will choose the status quo option when the status quo is not clearly dominated by any other option.” (Does uncertainty cause inertia in decision making? An experimental study of the role of regret aversion and indecisiveness)

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#5: Users prefer fewer choices, as too many choices can overwhelm them

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• Ray #1: Interviewee says limited choices make decision making easier. They have trouble with making big choices like college major.

• Adrian #1: Interviewee says that there is a positive correlation between the amount of choices and the amount of indecisiveness

• Adrian #2: "It's easier to decide what to eat when there are already choices given out."

• Aliyah #1: Interviewee tries to predict the outcomes of their decisions

• Saalim #1: Interviewee considers outcomes of their decisions.

• Article: “Without a doubt, having more options enables us, most of the time, to achieve better objective outcomes. Again, having 50 styles of jeans as opposed to two increases the likelihood that customers will find a pair that fits. But the subjective outcome may be that shoppers will feel overwhelmed and dissatisfied.” (More isn’t always better).