Numerosity and consumer behavior / created by Rashmi Adaval

Psychologists have long been intrigued by how humans and nonhuman primates process magnitudes such as “how far, how fast, how much, how long, and how many.” This fascination perhaps stems from the fact that magnitude estimations of space, time, and number form the bedrock of most of the decisions that we make in daily life. Decisions about how many cookies to eat, how many payments to make, how many days to wait for a product, all have one thing in common: they require a fundamental ability to be able to discern discriminable elements of the type of stimulus in question. Although distinguishing one from many is an ability that is shared by humans and nonhuman primates, what makes research in this area particularly intriguing is the layer of complexity that arises when we take our ability to mathematically represent different quantities in different units (e.g., 1 month, 4 weeks, 30 days) and map it on to this more fundamental ability. The mapping of this numerical system onto a more generalized magnitude representational system allows us to raise the basic question: do magnitude estimates change when they are represented in a different unit or metric?