Here’s a plausible human circular preference. You won a prize! Your three options are: (A) 5 lovely plates, (B) 5 lovely plates and 10 ugly plates, (C) 5 OK plates.
No one has done this exact experiment to my knowledge, but plausibly (based on discussion of a similar situation in Thinking Fast And Slow chapter 15) this is a circular preference in at least some people: When people see just A & B, they’ll pick B because “it’s more stuff, I can always keep the ugly ones as spares or use them for target practice or whatever”. When they see just B & C, they’ll pick C because “the average quality is higher”. When they see just C & A, they’ll likewise pick A because “the average quality is higher”.
This makes no sense to me. Why would you pick C over B? B Pareto dominates C since it contains 5 lovely plates whereas C only has 5 OK plates.
Well, I guess it wouldn’t be a circular preference for you. :)
I think it wouldn’t occur to many people that they could do one thing with the better 5 plates, and do a different thing with the worse 10 plates, if the plates are not presented in a way the 5+10 division salient. Imagine the better and worse ones are all mixed up, and they’re all the same design, such that they’re obviously meant to be used as a set, but 2/3rds of the plates in the set have obvious cracks and chips. My impression (again see related experiments in the book chapter) is that many people would just take in the set of 15 plates as a whole and say “man, we can’t eat off these, someone could get a cut, the sauce would leak onto the table etc.”. The person would have to be kinda thinking outside the box and putting in some effort to notice that there are 5 plates in the set with no chips or cracks, and think of the strategy where they use those and throw out the other 10.
If the 5 lovely plates were literally identical in the two sets, I think (for many people) it might serve as a sort of “hint” that they should consider the clever course of action, the one that involves splitting up the B set (i.e. doing one thing with the 10 cracked & chipped plates, and doing a different thing with the 5 other B plates). That same clever splitting idea might also pop into some people’s heads for the B-versus-C comparison, but I think it would be less obvious / salient, so fewer people would think of that, leaving at least a subset of people who would choose both B-over-A if that were the choice, and C-over-B if that were the choice.
This makes no sense to me. Why would you pick C over B? B Pareto dominates C since it contains 5 lovely plates whereas C only has 5 OK plates.
Well, I guess it wouldn’t be a circular preference for you. :)
I think it wouldn’t occur to many people that they could do one thing with the better 5 plates, and do a different thing with the worse 10 plates, if the plates are not presented in a way the 5+10 division salient. Imagine the better and worse ones are all mixed up, and they’re all the same design, such that they’re obviously meant to be used as a set, but 2/3rds of the plates in the set have obvious cracks and chips. My impression (again see related experiments in the book chapter) is that many people would just take in the set of 15 plates as a whole and say “man, we can’t eat off these, someone could get a cut, the sauce would leak onto the table etc.”. The person would have to be kinda thinking outside the box and putting in some effort to notice that there are 5 plates in the set with no chips or cracks, and think of the strategy where they use those and throw out the other 10.
But in that kind of situation, wouldn’t those people also pick A over B for the same reason?
If the 5 lovely plates were literally identical in the two sets, I think (for many people) it might serve as a sort of “hint” that they should consider the clever course of action, the one that involves splitting up the B set (i.e. doing one thing with the 10 cracked & chipped plates, and doing a different thing with the 5 other B plates). That same clever splitting idea might also pop into some people’s heads for the B-versus-C comparison, but I think it would be less obvious / salient, so fewer people would think of that, leaving at least a subset of people who would choose both B-over-A if that were the choice, and C-over-B if that were the choice.