Chloe Fan – cnf2108
Thinking and Decision Making
Professor Fox-Glassman
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Decision Diary
1a. Over spring break, I was introduced to a decision that centered around the search for the best Italian food to eat for dinner on the first night of my arrival in Florence. Starving, I immediately began contemplating my choices. Did I want to choose a place that served pizza, pasta, lasagna, or just a platter of assorted Italian sweets like gelato and cannoli? Rather than being presented with a set of choices, I chose from an endless possibility of dinner restaurants. Evidently, I had to narrow down my choices and decided upon a set of restaurant options that fit the criteria of places that served pasta, were highly rated on Yelp by more than 100 reviewers, and within one mile from our B&B.
2a. My material goals centered around choosing a location that was within a mile of my location, didn’t have a long wait, and served pasta. As I was tired, hungry, and wanted to eat quickly in order to get some rest for the next day, I decided upon a trattoria that was 0.5 miles away from my B&B. This fit into the distance constraint that I had set for myself. Additionally I surveyed the menu prior to leaving to ensure that they served a variety of pasta plates and followed up with a phone call to the restaurant to inquire about wait times. Their response that they did not have a wait coincided my time constraint goal and solidified my decision to eat there. In order to fulfill my emotional goals of feeling happy and avoiding disappointment, I wanted to choose a restaurant that was highly rated on Yelp by more than 100 reviewers.
2b. In evaluating my choice options, I drew upon analytical and affect-based decision modes. The analytical decision mode was engaged when I discovered multiple restaurants that fit into my criterion and began to consider my cost-benefit tradeoff. As I surveyed the menu of these dinner venues, I noted that many of these venues had unappealing, poorly photographed plates of pasta and cartoon images of gelato splattered across their menu. I wanted an authentic Italian restaurant to eat at and believed that a respectable venue would not promote tacky, disorganized images. Instead, these photos were reminiscent of a touristy restaurant and I was sure that if I chose to eat at one of these places, I would have increased benefits by decreasing monetary loss, but lowered the satisfaction received by the meal. Consequently, there still existed an imbalance between cost and benefit and I decided to continue searching for another restaurant. Upon finding Trattoria ZaZa, I began to engage my affect-based decision making. My immediate impression of the restaurant was improved by the sight and smell of waiters rushing by with plates of pasta. This in turn heightened my hunger and rewarded my affective goals of wanting a satisfactory and joyful meal. The instantaneous satisfactory response I received wavered my decision to stay...
