Hobson's +1 Choice Effect

About Hobson's +1 Choice Effect

Hobson's choice comes from Thomas Hobson, he was a wealthy landowner and stable owner in the 17th Century with over 40 horses. He would give those who came to ride his horses only one option, take the nearest horse to the stable door. Why? He didn't want the best horses to get overworked. If he allowed people to choose for themselves they would choose the best horses. So he told people to take the horse nearest to the stable doors or not to take one at all.

In 2004 Barry Schwartz developed the concept of Paradox of Choice. This concept shows how people become overwhelmed when they have too many options and how this leads to frustration. The important part about the concept of Paradox of Choice is that it only comes into play after 3 or more choices. The fact is that offering people two or more options is exactly better than offering only one or none at all.

Research has shown when somebody is confronted with Hobson's choice they are more likely to go for ''leave it'' than the "take it" option. But, when there is another option added it feels easier to make a decision and opt for one of the choices shown to us.

When we're facing a ''take it or leave it'' choice, we use all our mental energy from System 2. System 2 is our slower, more deliberative, and more logical mind while System 1 is instinctive and emotional, more about this subject can be found in this article about System 1 and 2 from Daniel Kahneman. Studies have shown that when you get two options instead of one we use the same mental energy but instead of dividing it on "take it" or "leave it" it's now dividing on "take it" or "second option". As you can now understand this makes us more likely to choose one of the two "suggest/active" options instead of leaving it.

• Always show a second option to choose from with your call-to-action.
• Let both the options lead to the same goal, also known as trivial choice
• No! Do not offer the alternative second option when your visitor/customer is goal-directed (returning visitors?). There might be a counter-effect since it might lead to distraction of the conscious System 2 behavior.

Hobson's +1 Choice Effect example

There are different stages in which your visitors might make choices. Ask yourself this question first, how do visitors enter your website? Use data from Google Analytics (or any other data collection tool you're using) to make sure you're right.

The next question you should ask yourself is, what is the goal on the pages your users are landing on. This could be to buy a product, subscribe to the newsletter, or let them download something.

In this case, we will continue with buying a product on an e-commerce website. The Hobson's +1 Choice Effect is often used for e-commerce websites. Let's take a look at some other examples. The first option is from Amazon.com.

Like you can see there are multiple ways in which you can use this Hobson's +1 Choice Effect. You can either add a compare functionality as an extra option or add to favorites.

What metric to use when experimenting?

The metric used to measure success is the click-through rate (CTR). CTR is used because you would like to keep your visitors on your website rather than leaving your website. If they go to the next page this experiment can already be seen as successful

Summarized

Implementing Hobson's +1 Choice Effect isn't that hard. It's just about adding one extra option your visitors can choose from. Examples could be

Add extra call-to-action button

Try experimenting by adding a call-to-action to your homepage to see if it increase the click-through rate (CTR). For e-commerce websites, this could be options like Buy bow or Save for later / On wish list.

Don't add extra option if the choice is logical

When the choice is obvious you don't want to distract your visitors with other options. This is often the case for landing pages. Landingpages are conversion-driven, most of the time with paid advertisement. Only a selected audience gets to see the ads and landing pages. They are likely to buy or convert since it's the audience that you have selected and which is very relevant. In this case, you don't want to give any options, this is only a distraction from the tasks they have to complete and there is a high chance they might leave the website because of this extra option.

Bonus tips for experiments

Down below you can find some ideas for your experiments.

• Add a second option to your call to action buttons (this can be a link, at least it shouldn't look like the main call-to-action. Options like compare and favorite might work well)
• If possible try to lead both actions to the same end goal, for example to buy a product
• When your customer has only one goal doesn't offer them the second option, you wouldn't want them to be distracted