Chicago Booth Review Podcast Are we too obsessed with numerical data?
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Jan 28, 2026 Erika Kirgios, a researcher who studies decision making and 'quantification fixation.' She explains how people overweight numbers in trade-offs. She gives real-world examples from hiring, ratings, and fitness tracking. She describes experiments showing when numeric attributes win and how comparison fluency makes numbers feel easier to use.
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Numbers Dominate Hard Trade-Offs
- Quantification fixation is the tendency to overweight numeric information when making trade-offs among attributes.
- People neglect important nonnumeric details even when those details matter to the decision.
Format Alone Shifts Choices
- Experiments varied which attribute was numeric versus verbal across many choice scenarios to test effects.
- The format change alone shifted decisions toward the option that looked better numerically.
Real Hiring Task Revealed The Bias
- In a paid hiring task, participants chose the candidate who scored higher on the numerically shown attribute despite incentives.
- People picked the math-strong candidate when math was numeric and the trivia-strong candidate when trivia was numeric.