The ‘When’ decision
Not the most obvious kind of decision, but arguably the most important one
I was only about this tall when I was first told this riddle, but straight away I thought it was fascinating. My father asked me, what weighs more, a kilo (I grew up in metric) of feathers, or a kilo of lead? My intuition immediately suggested the kilo of lead would weigh more — everyone knows lead is heavier than feathers, right? Subsequently being told the right answer — and worse, having to admit it! — made it stick with me all these years.
I was reminded of this a few days ago, when reading an article discussing research by Kaitlin Woolley and Peggy Liu, marketing professors at Cornell and Pittsburgh universities respectively, which looked at people’s ability to estimate the calories of the food on their plate. It seems we are not really much good at doing so.
Inherent characteristics
Health experts suggest two distinct approaches to people who want to control their calorie intake by evaluating what they eat. One is to make a quantitative estimate of the calories in the food, the other is to simply rate it qualitatively, e.g., on a nine-point scale from “very few” to “very many”. The argument in favour of the latter is that it is much easier to manage for the lay person, while leading to…
