What’s on the menu?

3 minute read

This is a fun one. The famous behavioural economist – Dan Ariely, simulated an experiment at a university bar to study how people are influenced by groups while ordering at a restaurant. He also found some curious insights around customer satisfaction when they order their food out loud compared to when they write down the order.

As a part of this experiment, Dan and his team rented out a bar and offered a complimentary tasting menu of beers to all patrons in a group. The tasting menu consisted of 4 beers. The team informed all the tables about this offer and asked everyone on the table (one by one) to state their preference for the type of beer they would like to taste. After tasting the beer, they were also asked to fill out a questionnaire about how they rated the beer.

The team observed that when the customers were asked one by one which beer they would prefer to drink they tended to choose beers different from their friends on the same table. The researchers attributed this to the primal need for humans to stand out and appear discerning to their peer group.

What was interesting was that when the experiment was repeated with one small change in the construct (Customer were asked to write down their order so that their choice would not be affected by what their peers order), they tended to order overlapping beers a lot more than in the first instance of the experiment. This result clearly backed the initial hypothesis of the researchers regarding the human need to stand out.

When they compared the beer ratings from the questionnaires, they observed another interesting phenomenon. In the first experiment, people who ordered first, rated their beers a lot higher than people who ordered second and so on to the third and the fourth. This further indicated that when choices are independent and not driven by peers, customers order items which they are most likely to enjoy (since the choice is driven by rational expectations alone and not the need to stand out).

Interestingly enough, the ratings of all participants in the second experiment (Written orders) were similar and uniformly higher than the first experiment (Except for the people who ordered first).

This experiment reinforced the fact that humans are mostly irrational and even though rationally they would choose a beer that they think would maximize enjoyment, the social need to stand out and be unique drive people to make choices which may be contrary to rational behaviour.

Original research by Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav

https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Sequential%20Choice%20Group%20Settings.pdf