Tessa's Take: Using Choice Architecture: A Big Business Advantage for You?

Like all of us, Homer is a 'cognitive miser'. We don't like thinking - deliberative thinking is hard and difficult.  

Humans make less than perfectly thought out decisions all the time, intuitively, emotionally, effortlessly and quickly. We're good at it - it's why we have survived.

If you give people a choice of three things on a menu, they will choose in the middle. Online clothing retailers exploit this brilliantly.

If someone is buying a new TV, the cost of spending time researching all the possibilities and acquiring all the information on a perfect TV is emotionally high. So they will 'anchor' their choices on their existing TV,"I need a bigger one."

Humans don't make decisions in space.  It is a common human tendency to rely too heavily on one trait or  on one piece of information when making decisions. So, if people are looking at a new product on a shelf, they will compare it, 'anchor' it, with something roughly equivalent that they are familiar with.

Don't give customers a lot to think about - help them choose on intuition.