The Consumer is Stupid: More is NOT Necessarily Better

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.cellular-news.com/story/35175.php?source=rss' target='_blank'>http://www.cellular-news.com/story/....php?source=rss</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"Many products have numbers attached: megapixels for cameras, wattage ratings for stereos, cotton counts for sheets. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that consumers are heavily influenced by quantitative specifications, even meaningless ones. "We find that even when buyers can directly experience the underlying attributes and the specifications carry little or no additional information, they are still heavily influenced by the specifications," write authors Christopher K. Hsee (University of Chicago), Yang Yang, Yangjie Gu, and Jie Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)." </em></p><p>And hence, the megapixel war and confirmation that consumers are quite often stupid.&nbsp; I've gotten blue in the face explaining to people why they are far better off with a quality camera with lower megapixels than just automatically going for whatever the highest megapixel camera they can find in their budget.&nbsp; Case in point, I'll still take my Canon S2 IS at 'only' 5 megapixels over a cheap 10 megapixel camera.</p>

[Rob Alexander]

'Stupid' isn't the right word, 'ignorant' is. People do that because they do not know enough about the products to make an informed judgement directly and so they infer quality through the only information they do have... product specifications and price. It's easy to judge people and call them stupid when the purchase is in an area of our own expertise, but we shouldn't be quick to cast stones. We all make poorly-informed decisions on products that we don't understand, though the Net is making it easier for those willing to put in a bit of effort to improve their decision-making significantly.