When there is a medium placed between our effort and a desired out­come, we strive to max­imise this medium regard­less of whether or not it leads opti­mally to that out­come (think points or vir­tual cur­ren­cies as a medium when attempt­ing to obtain goods).

That’s my attempt at a con­cise sum­mary of the find­ings from a study coin­ing the phrase ‘medium max­imi­sa­tion’.

This exam­ple taken from the paper (pdf) and pre­sented by The New York Times may help:

Stu­dents were given a choice between two sim­ple tasks. One would take six min­utes, and the stu­dents were told that they would get a gal­lon of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream as a reward. The other would require seven min­utes of work, and the pay­ment would be a gal­lon of Haagen-Dazs pistachio.

Not sur­pris­ingly, since the sec­ond option involved more work and a less pop­u­lar fla­vor, only about a quar­ter of the stu­dents chose it.

But the researchers also repeated the exper­i­ment with a cou­ple of tweaks. In the new ver­sion, the six-minute task led to a pay­off of 60 points, and the seven-minute task brought 100 points.

The researchers then told the stu­dents that any­one who fin­ished with between 50 and 99 points would be given a gal­lon of vanilla ice cream. Any­one with 100 points would get pistachio.

Prac­ti­cally, there was no dif­fer­ence between the two exper­i­ments. But the out­comes ended up being very different.

In the com­ments of a pre­vi­ous post of mine look­ing at the denom­i­na­tion effect, the idea that “the greater the level of abstrac­tion, the more ready we are to spend” was mooted. So it seems to be the case here.

via @BFchirpy