Most (commercial) choices contain too many aspects, with the result that not all aspects can be considered. Therefore, we tend to focus our attention only on some aspects and ignore those that are less salient.

In this way, we place our focus on only one aspect, making misjudgments, for example, with how happy we will be with our choice of option. This is called the Focusing Effect and is related to the attentional bias and anchoring.

“We can only give attention to a limited number of issues at the same time.”

An example from science

Professor David Schkade (Professor of Behavioral Science) and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman (1998) conducted research on the Focusing Effect. They asked respondents how much happier they think people from California are compared to people from the Midwestern United States. What turned out: generally, people (even Midwesterners) think California residents would be much happier. In reality, however, there is no difference...

What happens here is that - because of our narrow focus - we place too much value on the typical differences between the Midwest and California, such as the sunny weather and easy-going lifestyle. In reality, however, there are many aspects that actually have an even more significant impact on happiness and well-being (such as crime rates and health care, for example).

Example A/B testing
We tested for the online bank MoneYou the effect of putting more attention on the interest rate, and it turned out to be an illustrative example of the Focusing Effect. In fact, moving the interest rate from the title to an image (in an attention-grabbing way) improved conversion!

Online Dialogue also tested the Focusing Effect at the well-known vacation review website Zoover. The goal was to increase the amount of clicks on ad links. This succeeded: by omitting the brand icons and placing the right content bar lower on the page, the focus on the links increased, leading to greater focus capacity and thus more clicks on the ad links.

Online Persuasion tips
To properly deploy the Focusing Effect, Online Dialogue has a few tips:

• Draw attention to just a few (up to a maximum of three) of your USPs.
• Emphasize your most unique USP. Do this in such a way that your customers lose attention from the less positive aspects.
• Focus not necessarily on your best aspects, but also on those aspects that are significantly different from those of your competitors.
• Finally, also emphasize the enormous change that takes place the moment people buy your product, or start using your service

Read more about the focusing effect

• Schkade, D. A., Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9, 340-346.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#Focusing_effect

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This article was published on Sept. 20 at Webanalists.com