Study Shows: Consumers Think 36 Months Is Longer than 3 Years

  

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Does that headline sound like something out of The Onion, satirical newspaper of record? Sadly, it’s real, inspired by a study in the Journal of Consumer Research (read Science Daily’s coverage).

The authors of the study report that “people typically fail to realize that the unit of quantitative information is arbitrary.” This “unit effect” leads to anomalous conclusions: to most consumers, the difference between an 84-month warranty and a 108-month warranty looks bigger than the difference between a 7-year and a 9-year warranty. A 95 out of 100 rating looks better than 9.5 out of 10.

This made me think of another priceless bit of satire: Remember Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, who was convinced his amplifier was “one louder” because its dial went to eleven instead of ten? But one what, exactly? Nigel didn’t care, he only knew that it was one more.

More serious is when a borrower thinks that 36 months to pay is much longer than 3 short years. Of course we have known all along that merchandisers are very good at playing off our failings in number sense.

The good news here is that these mistakes were not replicated when subjects were reminded of the arbitrary nature of the units used to express a given bit of information. Math teachers: here’s another example of the crucial importance of what you do. Keep forging away at number sense; and while you’re at it, throw in plenty of unit sense, too.

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