Construal Level Theory Archives - Gamified UK

The Effect of Time and Knowledge on Decision Making

July 6, 2022 by Andrzej Marczewski

Many moons ago, I wrote an article titled “The Effect of Time on Decision Making”. In it, I covered some fairly meaty topics that talked about Construal Level Theory and Decision Field Theory and how they explained the way we made decisions.

The Basic Theory

Very simply out, Construal Level Theory tried to explain how we prioritise a decision based on how close it is to us. If it is abstract, or a decent time in the future, then we give it less merit and less focus. If it is concrete, or very close in time to now, then we will do the opposite – give it stronger focus and concentrate more on making a decision.

Decision Field Theory talks more about the actual process of making the decision. Multiple outcomes and threads will be in our minds and as we add more information and have more time, we make potentially better or at least more informed decisions, by filtering out those that no longer fit our current level of understanding.

When we combine these, we start to get an interesting look at how time can affect our decision-making process. Whilst it may seem that having more time would lead to better decisions, if we look purely at Decision Field Theory, Construal Level Theory tells us that too much time will lead to postponing that decision in favour of other, more concrete decisions that need to be made.

However, if we don’t have as much time to make the decision, we potentially throw out the best ones in favour of the ones we can reach quickest.

What a paradox. We are saying that more time does not always lead to better decisions, but then neither does less time! How very Goldilocks of our brains!

The Effect of Knowledge and Time in Decision Making

So, let’s look at it slightly differently to just the effect of time on decision making, and pull something practical out of it all!

I propose the following concept – which I will build up on – so don’t just steal this image!

If we are short on time and have little knowledge of the question at hand, we are going to make emotional decisions. These are decisions where we just don’t have enough concrete understanding to apply, so we have to just go with what feels right.

The more knowledge you have on a topic, the less you need to rely on emotion and the more you can rely on the implicit understanding, making an educated decision in a short time.

Take a quiz for example. You are asked, “Which member of The Beatles wrote Yellow Submarine?”

If you don’t know the answer and know nothing about the Beatles, you are going to take a pure guess on gut instinct and maybe say Paul McCarney as he is still pretty famous and you know he was a Beatle.

If you know a little bit about the Beatles, you might know that John Lennon had the most writing credits – so he is a safe bet. Here you are in between an emotional answer and an educated one.

If you are a Beatles fan, you may well immediately know that it was in fact Ringo Starr – providing an educated instant answer.

If we now extend the time, so no longer a quiz, but a question in a newspaper crossword. Whilst there still is a slight time constraint in that you would want to finish the crossword today, you are able to take longer.

If you just don’t have the knowledge and you can’t get to the answer, you might decide to hit the internet and research it. This takes effort, so may put you off, but if you are reaching the end of the day and your internal deadline is becoming more concrete – this may be your only way to get the answer.

However, if you are a fan of the Beatles, you may be able to reason your way to the answer, even if it is not on the tip of your tongue. It might be that you initially go with Lennon, but do not feel it is right (or in the case of a crossword, it isn’t the right number of letters). So you think some more about it and slowly start to remember a documentary you saw about Beatles songs and then, all of a sudden, the info is there – it was Ringo Starr! It is still taking effort, but the extra time allows your brain to do its thing and filter through the information stored there and keep adding knowledge and filtering out the wrong answers.

Remember that more time doesn’t always mean people will use that time correctly. Having 2 hours to make a decision, does not mean I will spend 2 hours making the decision! Also, if making that decision feels like it is too much effort, having more time won’t make any difference either. You could almost add a new dimension to the chart that has effort pushing back on the likelihood that you will correctly use the time to make a decision.

Designing for Balance

With all this said, the reality is most people will be making balanced decisions throughout their day. Where their knowledge is reasonable and the time given is reasonable and the amount of effort required is…. reasonable. A happy and comfortable medium, that leads to us making decent decisions that we are happy with throughout the day.

When we build our gamified solutions, we can make use of this to make users feel like they are winning and doing the right things for the majority of their time.

By providing enough information and giving them enough time to make balanced decisions, they will more often than not be making good decisions and feeling happy with what they have done.

Creating Challenges

Then, to keep things interesting, we can play around with the balance to create challenges.

First, we can reduce the amount of knowledge provided to them, but provide a little more time for them. This forces them to either research or reason their way to a decision – pushing them slightly out of their comfort zone. In a game, this would be some sort of strategic siege of a new type of base. You have a general level of knowledge regarding sieges, but you don’t know the specifics of this base. So drawing on your existing knowledge, you take time to test defences, scout for weak spots and research the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.

Alternatively, we can reduce the time limit, forcing you to make instinctive decisions. If you are playing a shoot’em up game, this could look like faster enemies and more of them entering the screen. If you are skilled, then your decisions on where and when to shoot will be educated and probably better aimed. However, increasing the speed further would lead you to guess more, using emotional instinct to hit your targets.

In both instances, we are pushing the player to make decisions in different ways.

Limited Time Offers

I thought I would finish on a retail trick – the limited-time offer. We’ve all experienced it. You are looking to buy something and you are presented with a limited-time offer. Buy in the next 15 minutes and you will get a sweet deal. It could be online, it could be a salesman telling you that “If you pay in cash now, I’ll give you 15% off – but my boss won’t let me carry this over until tomorrow”.

Retailers do this to try and encourage you to make an emotional decision. To make the desire to own the item outweigh the need to own it. Here they are taking away the time needed to reason or research your decision. This is very powerful and even more so when we combine it with FOMO messaging – only 3 left and Dave just bought one!

However, this needs to be used sensibly as people do become immune to it, especially if they feel the only reason to do it is to trick them. However, when done properly and used as a way to inform the buyer that there is a limit to how long they can wait to make their decision, then it can be powerful and helpful. It is more annoying to miss out on an item because you didn’t know there was limited stock than it is to be informed there is limited stock!

So there you have it. Hopefully, this is handy, if only for the image. Time makes a massive difference to how we make decisions as does the information we have available to us. Use both to challenge and encourage users.

Gamification, delayed gratification and rewards

May 4, 2017February 6, 2015 by Andrzej Marczewski

There has always been this common thought that if you have to work harder for something or you have to wait for it, the reward will be all the greater in your mind. Now for the most part. that is absolutely true. The anticipation of some sort of reward ¹ is a massive trigger for dopamine and can make the reward all the more… well, rewarding – which we like!

The Marshmallow Test

However, not everyone is able to wait for a reward. There was a fantastic experiment in the 70s now referred to as the Marshmallow Test ². The set up was that children were sat in a room and a marshmallow was placed on the table in front of them. They were given an offer. Eat this one marshmallow now OR wait until I come back and you can have two marshmallows. It is worth watching the videos if you need a smile!

The really interesting part of this was what happened to the children over the years, you see they followed their progress for 40 years! What they found was that the children who could wait for the second marshmallow, who could delay the gratification, were more successful in just about every way over the years ³! Their mindset allowed them to take short term pain for long term gain.

Another interesting study that is very relevant here was done around 2012 and it looked at how experience, or as they called it “environmental reliability ⁴“, affected the marshmallow test. The set up was similar, but before the test began the children were split into two different groups. They were both offered certain things, like extra crayons for colouring in pictures. The difference was, one group got given the things they were promised, the other was not. When they then ran the marshmallow test on these groups, the group that had been getting things they were promised showed a much great ability to delay gratification and wait for the second marshmallow. Their expectations and trust were such that they felt confident that the researcher would return. The other group had no reason to trust the researcher, so ate the marshmallow straight away!

They proved that delayed gratification was a cognitive process. We assess based on experience whether it is worth waiting or not.

Applying this to Gamification

There are a few big takeaways from this that we can apply to gamification.

People will wait for rewards if they feel they are worth it.
People will wait for rewards if they trust that it will come.
Anticipation can lead to greater gratification from a reward.

But, we need to be able to apply this in a reliable way. The diagram below gives a quick outline of how you can be done.

Reward Value vs Relative Effort and Delay

If you make someone wait for a reward, make sure it is worth them having. That does not mean the reward has to be larger, rather the value they place on the reward is larger. Take a relationship. Relationships take work, they take time. When you first meet someone it is rare that you are suddenly best friends. But take the time and work at it and the friendship can become incredibly rewarding.

Goals that are in the distance can be hard to focus on. I wrote a while ago about something called Construal Level Theory.

The basic idea is that events that are about to happen are perceived as concrete in out mind. It is easy to visualise them and work on them. Distant events are perceived as abstract, they are much harder for use to give urgency or importance to because they feel less real. Think about exams. Two months before an exam, revision seems less urgent – the exam is an abstract concept to us – it is not here so is not quite real. As we get closer to the exam, revision may start to get more important. The day of the exam, it is very real and you start to wish you had been revising for two months after all!

Along the way though we need signals that we are following the right path. Going back to the relationship, if we start to feel that the other person is not returning the friendship, that there are no signals that it is going well, we will begin to drift away and the friendship will fail.

So, whilst waiting for the big prize, people need to have smaller ones to nudge them along. These will have less value to them but will help to keep them on the right path.

In our gamified system, the small, regular nudges come in the form of things like points. They have less value to the user, but they show the user they have done something right. Slightly larger nudges would include more visible and potentially more valuable rewards (think badges that represent certain smaller achievements). These could me considered as short term goals (remember SMART?) Finally, after hard work and patience, the larger reward. These will be less common but should represent some real level of achievement or be attached to a larger value reward of some sort.

Along the way, there is nothing wrong with randomly giving a larger reward that has not been “earned” as a way to just have the system say “Thanks for sticking with it”. These will give the user a nice sense of feeling they are valued. Avoid making people work hard and wait just to get a low-value reward. They will not appreciate this at all!

Perceived Value

It is very important to appreciate that the perceived value of things can reduce over time. What someone will work really hard to achieve initially, they may not be willing to work as hard for a second or a third time. They will expect the value of the final reward to be greater each time, especially if they are expected to work harder. So when you think about your system, as the difficulty and skill requirements increase, so should the value of the long-term reward! We could consider Reward vs Investment. The investment could be time, effort, emotional etc.

A theoretical example

Take a look at your system and see where your rewards sit on the grid

Download Reward vs Effort Analysis Grid PDF
Download Reward vs Investment Analysis Grid PDF

Instant wins are not always the most rewarding. Learn how to use delayed gratification to increase the value of rewards in your system.

Big thanks to the Gamification Hub group on Facebook for the discussion around this. A must visit resource if you are interested in gamification!

Kuszewski, Andrea. “The Science Of Pleasure: Part III.” Science 2.0. N.p., 26 Aug. 2010. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://www.science20.com/rogue_neuron/science_pleasure_part_iii_neurological_orgasm>.
“Stanford Marshmallow Experiment.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment>.
Clear, James. “40 Years of Stanford Research Found That People With This One Quality Are More Likely to Succeed.” 40 Years of Stanford Research Found That People With This One Quality Are More Likely to Succeed. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification>.
Kidda, Celeste, Holly Palmeria, and Richard Aslina. “Download PDFs.” Rational Snacking: Young Children’s Decision-making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs about Environmental Reliability. Cognition, Jan. 2013. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027712001849>.

The Effect of Time on Decision Making

November 10, 2017August 5, 2013 by Andrzej Marczewski

I am fascinated with decision making and why people make certain decisions. There are loads of great papers out there, some of which I actually understand!

What has really caught my attention is the effect of time constraints on decision making.

Time Constraints in Games

We see this a lot in games, sometimes obvious other times, not so obvious. It is also used to varying degrees.

For example. The Walking Dead uses this to great effect during certain conversations. The game asks you to make a decision then given a few choices. Whilst you decide there is a progress meter counting down that will force neutral and probably unwanted response if you don’t choose. Within the context of the game, this forces you to often go with gut instinct over long considered decisions. This gives the feeling of drama and in some cases real dread, with all choices often seeming negative – leaving you to choose which is least bad.

In Mario, there is always a timer ticking away at the top of the screen. For the most part, this does not really mean much as it has ample time to complete a map – or so it seems. Yet, after deciding to collect everything on a level, you often find time running out and suddenly it all feels more desperate as you sprint to the finish line!

These are obvious examples of time pressure on decision making, you can see a timer and know it will run out at a certain point. Games offer many other types of time constraints, from how you react to people shootin at you, to how you are going to get from one side of a map to the other as you are being chased. These kinds of pressures force fast thinking, reflex action and definitely don’t encourage considered or creative solutions. But, these kinds of moments often feel more “real” and emotional, they have more meaning in that split second.

Some people use this to get “gut reaction” decisions in the context of workshops and the like. A popular “game” is 3-12-3 or variations of it. A problem is set and groups of people are set the challenge of solving it. There are then three phases of the brainstorming process, all tightly timed. The first lasts 3 minutes and is used to come up with some ideas. Keeping the initial time tight forces participants to not over think the problem. Next, they have 12 minutes to develop a more concrete idea from the ones pooled in the first phase. Finally, the groups have 3 minutes to present their idea to the other groups. Rules differ, with individuals and pairs and groups doing various things, but the key principle is always the same. The initial idea generation phase has a short time limit. But why would this produce better ideas?

Decision Field Theory – How We Decide

As I say, there is a lot of research on how we make decisions. The most predominant that I found was a piece called Decision Field Theory published by Jerome R. Busemeyer and James T. Townsend in 1993 [1]. In this paper, they discuss how people make decisions, based on available information and time etc. Basically, given a set of choices, your mind filters through all of the information available. Over time the probability of each choice “winning” changes until either time runs out or there is only one choice left in mind. The key thing for me considering time pressure on decision making is that changing the amount of time given for a decision to be made, can dramatically change the outcome.

Consider the graph below. The last vertical line (no time pressure) shows a decision that has been given its natural length of time to complete, in this case about 2 seconds. Here Choice A is the obvious winner. However, if the time is cut in half, you can see that at 1 second Choice C would win.

This, of course, does not tell us if choice A was better or worse than Choice C. The difference is that Choice A is a more considered choice. In fact, it may well be wrong, as the information you had when Choice C was winning may have been more accurate than the information you had at Choice A. You may have talked yourself out of Choice C based on some kind of personal bias you were not aware of. All sorts of things change the validity of each choice. Going back to our brainstorming game, in reality, the shorter time is given for idea generation probably doesn’t yield better ideas. What it does is give you a chance to generate more ideas without any of your natural bias’ kicking in, rather than ideas that are definitely better! After that, you have time to be a little more considered and creative.

Construal Level Theory – Abstract vs Concrete Perception in Decision Making

So time is a factor in what decisions you make. Another interesting part of decision making to consider is how we perceive things. In 1998 Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman published a paper called Temporal Construal Theory, which eventually became part of Construal Level Theory of Psychological Distance (CLT) (2010) [2]. This theory proposed that people thought about things differently based on the psychological distance between them and the thing. This could be physical distance, temporal (time), social etc. The further the experience is away from the object, the more abstract/high the level of construal or perception is. The closer the object is to the experience the more concrete/low level the construal is. This is the difference between considering WHY a thing needs to be done and HOW it is going to be done.

In his paper, Not to be Misconstrued, Nicolas Matthews gives a nice example of this. Consider locking a door. If the event of locking the door is in the future, you may think of it in terms of securing the house. This would be WHY you lock the door. When you are actually stood at the door with a key, you are more likely to think of HOW you lock the door as you are in the moment. Put the key in the door, turn the key, check the door. The closer to the event you are, the more concrete and real it becomes. You no longer have the luxury to think about why you need to do something; you have to think about how you will do it.

When given a task with unlimited (or at least ample) time, you have the luxury of considering the abstract thoughts of why. You can eliminate choices and come up with new ones and iterate old ones. The closer you are to the point the decision has to be made, the more focused you become on how you are going to achieve the given task.

Construal Level Theory – Example

A little example. You have a wall in front of you and are asked to go over it. To your side, you have rope, a ladder, and a hook. Given no time limit, there are a few ways you could do this. You could run and jump at the wall and try to climb over. You could create a grappling hook and use that to climb over. Finally, you could just put the ladder against it and climb up that. Given those choices, and based on factors such as your own abilities, bias’, height of the wall etc, you may decide to use the ladder. Someone else may create a grappling hook, even though it is not the most practical, it may be more fun. As you are further away in time from the task, you can think of the abstract solutions.

Now imagine that you are being chased towards the wall by a pack of dogs. Rather than taking two minutes to make a choice, you have to make it before you get to the wall in 30 seconds. Suddenly you have no time for abstracts, this is the here and now. At this point, jumping the wall seems like the best and most practical solution for getting over it quickly.

If the dogs were to go in a different direction before you get to the wall, other ideas would begin to become better options for you.

Summary

Time is an important factor in decision making, one we can’t forget about when designing any kind of system. With gamification as in games, we have the ability to use it to our advantage by imposing time constraints on systems that would otherwise not have them.

By giving shorter time limits to achieve tasks, we limit the number of options that can be considered by people, but by doing so may promote the most practical options to rise to the top. Forcing people into the here and now will make those decisions feel more concrete and real, giving them more immediate meaning.

Giving longer time periods allows people to craft more thoughtful ideas and come to more creative decisions, but can also lead to people dismissing good ideas based on personal bias or other external factors.

Use time to your advantage based on the outcomes you desire. If you want to encourage lots of good practical ideas, reduce the time given. If you want to promote creative and more abstract thoughts, give them longer!

Image courtesy of Danilin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net