Tokens
Give abstract quantities — votes, effort, risk, budget — a physical body that can be spent and moved.
Variants
- Cut out paper tokens — needs scissors
- Use coins as tokens — needs coins
- Spend pen tallies
- Cross off one per remaining session
Data fields
The fields a spec's page can set for this component (see switchback show tokens --json):
labelscountmilestone
Grounding
Helps: when a trade-off is abstract and every option could be rated highly; a fixed budget forces the differences that ratings let people skip, and cues to consider what a choice displaces shift decisions, though that effect is small and physical tokens themselves are untested
Backfires: when there are too many quantities to tokenise, or when a token count is read as a measurement rather than a rough allocation; neither has been studied
- CDistributing a fixed budget of tokens across options makes trade-offs and opportunity costs explicit, and yields more differentiated priorities than rating each option independently.Krosnick & Alwin (1988), Alwin & Krosnick (1985), Frederick, Novemsky, Wang, Dhar & Nowlis (2009), Maguire, Persson & Tinghög (2023), Read, Olivola & Hardisty (2017)
- CPhysically rearranging external objects to think, rather than to reach a physical goal, reduces the cognitive cost of a problem and improves or speeds its solution compared with manipulating the same elements mentally.Kirsh & Maglio (1994), Vallée-Tourangeau et al. (2016), Guthrie, Harris & Vallée-Tourangeau (2015)