Stanford Professor Itamar Simonson is very clever. He brought snacks to class for his students. However, he wasn’t just being cool; he used them for research. Professor Simonson learned that sometimes, we don’t want to make a choice or at least not a new one. Once we settle on an option, we stick with it if we must make the same one again.
Professor Simonson’s experiment about choice had one of his two classes pick their snack every week. The others had to choose their snack for the next three weeks at the first session. He found that people making an Intertemporal Choice, a choice for some point in the future, had different preferences than people making a series of immediate decisions. Students choosing for future class sessions selected more variety than those who chose the day for the upcoming session.
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