Customer Reviews

You Are What You Choose: The Habits of Mind That Really Determine How We Make Decisions

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In today's marketplace there exists a real glut of books that examine the ways in which people make decisions - Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide; Richard Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness; Zachary Shore, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions [BLUNDER -OS]; Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking; Ori Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior; etc.

This book is different.

As the authors explain, "What these and other books on marketing and decision making do not explore, however, is how individuals vary systematically in the way they approach decisions across many aspects of their lives. For example, people who are willing to accept risks in products and revisit their purchase decisions are also more likely to do the same in politics, and therefore call themselves independents. A main contribution of the TRAITS model is to show how a person's decision-making habits stay the same across different types of choices. This means that data on how you make decisions as a neighbor and voter can be used to predict your life as a consumer." So, what is the TRAITS model? 'TRAITS' stands for the "six core habits of mind that affect how you make decisions in all areas of your life." T=Time, R=Risk, A=Altruism, I=Information, T=meToo and S=Stickiness. Included in the Appendix is a brief self-survey, which you can use to score yourself and determine how you routinely make decisions (For example, my score looks like this: T=-1, R=-5,A=-1, I=+5, T=+1, S=+1).

The authors state that, "...TRAITS are like a Myers-Briggs personality test for how people choose. In the following chapters, we will explore the relationship between these TRAITS and many different types of decisions. We will also examine why some people make better choices than others, have an easier time learning from experience, and may act more like investors than consumers when the personal costs of living out their worldview become high." Also, "As we will see here and in sub-sequent chapters, our TRAITS model helps explain seemingly unrelated choices. To a large degree, how you choose (i.e., what type of decision maker you are) matters more than what you are choosing."

One important point that De Marchi and Hamilton make early on in this book is that whether one takes the view that people are rational (ex. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) or The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World), or irrational (ex. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions or The Mind of the Market: How Biology and Psychology Shape Our Economic Lives), in many respects both views are useless because neither view has any predictive value. Their view is simple: "We believe that habits of mind that people use to make decisions are essentially the same across many different types of choices, reflecting what they value and how they reach decisions." And in this respect, the TRAITS model does appear to have substantial predictive value in comparison to Demographics, Data Mining, Political Affiliation and or Microtargeting. Does the TRAITS model always beat-out these other models of decision making prediction? No, but the authors are very forthcoming in their TRAIT model's limitations, which is a nice bit of intellectual honesty to say the least.

In conclusion, De Marchi and Hamilton have struck upon a new and ingenious way to examine how it is people make decisions. While I have no doubt that the intended niche for this book is in the field of Marketing, I think it is equally valuable to anyone working in Economics, Political Science, Sociology and Psychology. "Overall, our model shows that the TRAITS matter in predicting a person's views about sexual choices just as much as in predicting a person's consumer choices. This is surprising because the questions that make up the TRAITS have nothing to do with social issues, politics, same-sex relationships, or anything similar. Rather, they deal with purchasing habits, what type of restaurants you eat at, or whether you visit the dentist." I hope - and expect - to read more about the TRAITS model in the future. Lastly, I think a great place to continue reading in the mean time, is Read Montague's book Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions.

I liked it, read it very quickly. A very nice light touch with a simple but important point: There is a ton of data available on consumption that is analyzed all the time by the usual suspects. Mostly these people just look for correlations which they then explain post hoc and then sell books and consulting based on what they've found. de Marchi and Hamilton look at the same data but focusing on correlations related to how consumers make decisions. This can then be exploited for fun, profit and world domination.

A couple of questions:
1) Psych folks must obsess over this stuff constantly, but I don't see anything in the book that indicates that those fields were consulted. There has to be at least one honest scientist over there who could help improve the model.
2) Why such a short survey? For instance, I know that the appearance of clothes and house are important to success as widely perceived, but they're not important to success as defined by me. Should my meToo be higher or lower with this in mind? A longer survey might be more precise.

I highly recommend this very useful and entertaining book.

A fascinating new approach to decision making made accessible to both the marketers and the marketed. The book is entertaining throughout with thought provoking analysis of decisions that everyone has made at some time or another. The authors break the mold of conventional survey data mining by also digging through google, twitter, and online political donation records to evaluate whether their model of human behavior is an accurate predictor in the new frontier. In the end, the examples of choices projected onto the underlying bases the authors have proposed leave the consumer ready to breakdown their decisions for themselves. Don't leave your choices up to the advertisers - read this book!

Conceptually, I liked the idea of categorical biases driving decision-making behavior and trying to tap that bias to better manage outcomes. But as a marketing professional the reality is in execution and if I have to ask questions to customers to categorize them first, then all of this falls apart. I am glad that the authors further expose something many of us have known for years, what people say and what people do are two different things (read: your customers and your employees!). But they also validate demographics, in the absence of other data, as an equally effective means to predict a particular behavior. The idea that demographics plus some other means to segment and more effectively communicate is strong. However, execution being critical, a 20-question quiz is not the way to tap a right-brain bias.

I just got mine. This is one of the most useful books I have ever seen. A terrific combination of common sense and careful empirical measurement. I am going to be consulting this book for a long time.

I think the authors erred in dumbing this down to the point that the core audience -- marketers and strategic businesspeople -- may be frustrated by the lack of depth. The core premise seems good, and admirably the authors chose to test their metrics against others'. But applications are mentioned with any depth only in the final few pages. There is not enough information on how to measure and analyze the data. The conclusions of tests and studies are usually discussed in just a few sentences, lacking in detail, and surrounded by too much "happy talk". If the authors were committed to this approach, they should have cut 100 pages from the text, as the endless repetition of shallowly explained examples adds little. Perhaps their attraction to the TRAITS model led them to try to make the book have "something for everyone"... if they had focused on marketers and strategic businesspeople with a high Information score, a low meToo score, and a reasonable high Risk score (i.e. the TRAIT's of people most likely to put this information to use) and then provided more depth instead of censoring everything that looked like a number, this could have been a seminal book. As it stands, I am glad to know the concept and may even apply it at work... but the book will be little help in going further.

From the front cover flap:

"On the surface, decisions about driving, eating, investing, and voting look very different. Yet the traits model shows that these decisions share many common elements, so that a given person will approach each of them in the same way. This means that the choices about products and people and politics can be combined systematically and used to predict what a person will buy or believe."

You are likely familiar with the concept of personality or behavioral or communication styles - there are many models to help us understand ourselves and others. This book introduces a six part model - TRAITS - that helps us understand what factors we value most in any decision process.

The TRAITS are:

Time
Risk
Altruism
Information
meToo
Stickiness

The book then talks about how to use this information from a marketing and sales perspective to help you target buyers and markets.

While not everything in the book is brand new, there is much that is valuable, and the TRAITS model is helpful. In addition, the book uses a wide variety of interesting examples, ala Made to Stick or Freakonomics - which is both smart from a marketing perspective and makes for a better read.

I read this book with two lenses - as a marketer, as I believe the book was intended, but also as a leader. After all, as leaders, we are in the business of not only making decision, but helping others do the same. The first portion of the book is extremely useful for us as leaders, though the last portion, even more focused on how to use from a marketing perspective, may be less so.

Overall I found the book a good relatively short read, and quite useful on several levels. If what I've said intrigues you at all, I encourage you to pick up a copy.

The authors are both in the same demographic, with very similar external appearances, and are seeking to explore why they make such different choices in life. They provide a traits assessment taken early on, to serve as a point of reference throughout the book. This was a great tool to assist with identifying trends in my decision making, and analyzing the "why"? This internal dialog was interesting, and coupled with other research I'm reading as it relates to different demographics, or specifically generations, it was intriguing to apply some of the authors' findings into other aspects of personal and interpersonal research.

Though I found the book interesting and thought provoking, I was distracted by the lack of detail in some of the provided examples and case studies. For example, because the authors were in the same stage of life, the examples would not appeal, or be relevant, to a diverse readership. The organization of the book itself was also confusing. Some of the same examples were used throughout and there was a tendancy to locate the initial reference in order to follow its secondary mentions.

Overall, the book was a quick read, and began addressing what is a very interesting topic. However, it seemed to only really brush the surface and I found myself wanting more by the end. It would be a great opportunity to conduct additional research and build off the existing findings providing additional, more thorough, relevant applications as it related to customer market segmentation, integrated marketing communications plans, influence of interactive media, etc.

The book is about significant research on human personality categorizations. In short, these are summarised by the mnemonic TRAITS for
Time
Risk
Altruism
Information
Me-Too
Stickiness.
These personality characteristics are somewhat like the now-famous Meyers-Briggs characteristics only more practical and arguably more effective.

And that's the problem: "Arguably".

The book does not support its argument well at all. The cases made for how well it works are poorly supported. Generally they are anecdotal; Sometimes graphs are added. What the graphs show is not well described. Often a comparison of TRAITS against demographic-based market research is made but this straw man is never very explicitly described.

The writing style is chatty and fun to read but not logically rigorous. Generally the sections are too short on content.

Also missing is any substantial discussion of the independence of the the different TRAITS characteristics with each other, or whether there are correlations between them. For instance, do Altruistic people value Time less?

There is a nice test for the reader in the back. However there are only 5 multiple-answer questions for each of the TRAITS characteristics and they presume one grew up and lives in the USA. Margin of error is very high.

What to do?
1) Hope the authors rewrite the work better the next time around
2) Try to dig out their prior academic work and see how it can explain what they wrote.

All in all, not great for the reader. Sad, because the fundamental idea of the TRAITS is terrific.

If you like to read about case studies of how people's core personality traits influence the disparate connections in their choices, you may like this book. The authors have done extensive data collection for a personality profile they call TRAITS which stands for: Time-awareness, Risk acceptance, Altruism, hunger for Information, meToo (following others) and Stickiness (loyalty). The authors carry out careful statistical analysis of TRAITS in competition with precise demographics and political party affiliation to make a wide range of predictions.

Each case study is about 3 pages long and often includes a chart showing the predictive power of TRAITS against demographics (with fine grain data) and political party. A range of applications from buying decisions, public health choices for patients and doctors, recycling attitudes, political issues to gambling are all shown to be interconnected by TRAITS. In most of the studies, TRAITS competes at almost a tie with microtargeted demographics data (the current method of choice for marketers and politicians among others). TRAITS shows there is another angle on the same questions which reaches deeper into the factors an individual evaluates (or fails to evaluate) in their choices. Political party only predicts one case study better than TRAITS or demographics and that was an evaluation of George W. Bush' job performance, so no big surprise it won there. Otherwise, political party is shown to be a poor predictor of almost any question you might ask, including many politically charged issues.

There are a few case studies where TRAITS and demographics do not perform at about the same degree of accuracy in prediction. For people choosing for or against flu shots, TRAITS wins decisively, on same sex marriage demographics wins decisively but only if you include data about church attendance. TRAITS wins decisively on a person's ability to accurately evaluate a car purchase based on its safety factors. But when one is trying to determine who will buy a car based on its style, demographics are more accurate.

The upshot of all this analysis seems to be that marketers, political pollsters and others who try to predict attitudes and behaviors of large groups should be using TRAITS along with their current demographic techniques (though the authors never conclude it this plainly). Pollsters will get a more complete picture and, in some cases, much more accurate results if they use TRAITS.

The authors provide an abbreviated form of their personality profile questionnaire as an appendix so you can get a sense of the actual survey used for some 30,000 participants in their study. One promise made in the book's opening was that the reader would be able to see how their own TRAITS affect their decisions, but this was never really assisted except in the last paragraphs of the book where the reader is told to keep their TRAITS in mind - decent advice, but it fell short of the spirit in the promise; not a big deal, maybe a page count restriction? On a positive note, as one would expect of good professors, there is a useful index in the back along with extensive research footnotes.

The author's research data and range of tests are impressive; TRAITS is impressive. But this book is not particularly enjoyable to read. The grammar is occasionally ambiguous, meanings are unclear or other errors in proofing are present (p6, 66, 79, 111). If you liked Freakonomics for its entertaining story-telling style, you will not find that here. Unlike Freakonomics though, these authors are clearer about their method and do not shroud it in clever story telling. This book is more academic than Freakonomics and you consequently learn a little more about statistical methods. There is some occasional humor in You Are What You Choose, but it does not change the fact the book is dry. It seems to be a collection of research case studies rapidly edited together into a popular book format.

I do not think this book is particularly good within its genre as a popular title, but its depth of research and systematic presentation makes it accessible to a wide audience interested in statistical methods and applications in social sciences. As popular non-fiction it is average at best; but the authors deserve much credit for making this contribution that showcases their research for a general audience, so I rate it better than average for that reason alone.