Remove the Middle Option
Recently I was talking to a friend who’s thinking about getting a car and wanted to get my thoughts on leasing for 3–5 years vs buying/financing. As it happened, I have also been thinking about getting a car, and I’d already decided that I wanted to lease because for the car I wanted to get, I didn’t want to own it for the long-term.
(This is a post about decision-making, not personal finances.)
I told my friend to remove the “mid-range” timescale and think of it this way: if you had to choose, would you want to get this car for 3 years and then replace it, or hold onto it for more than 8 years? “3 years”, my friend replied.
By removing the middle option (the “mid-range” 5-ish years in this case), it forces a clearer choice. Generalized: if you’re trying to decide between two choices, pick a high-signal comparison dimension, eliminate the middle of the range, and decide which end you prefer. You can also do this pairwise or bracket-style among more than two choices.
At work, we use this technique when scoring candidates’ interviews — we input interview scores along each of a handful of attributes that we care about. The software we use offers 5 options for each dimension, but we avoid the middle option for each dimension, forcing evaluators to come down on the side of “yes” or “no”.
!["Meh" is not an answer.](https://files.tanagram.app/file/tanagram-data/prod-feifans-blog/middle-option.png)
The middle option might not literally be in the middle. One example popularized by Tim Ferriss is to describe something on a scale of 1–10 without using 7 — you’d be forced to answer with either a 6-or-lower, which is generally “bad”, or an 8-or-higher, which is generally “good”. Removing the “meh” option leads to a clearer, more informative decision.