Salience
People weigh what they notice, and ignore true information that is not in front of them.
Salience is the degree to which a piece of information stands out at the moment of decision. Attributes that are visible, concrete and immediate get more weight than attributes that are equally real but require a step to retrieve. Disclosure does not create salience; placement does.
How it shows up in software
Salience is decided by the pricing page's largest number, whether shipping cost appears before the payment step, and whether the renewal date sits on the account screen or in an email from eleven months ago. Products routinely disclose everything and make almost none of it salient, which is legal and useless.
Using it well
- Put total cost, including fees, at the first point where a user compares options, not at the last step before payment.
- Show the renewal date and amount on the screen the user actually visits, and in the receipt.
- Make consequences concrete. This will delete 412 files beats this action cannot be undone.
- Test salience by asking five users, after they finish, what they will be charged and when. If they cannot say, the disclosure failed.
Where it turns manipulative
- Drip pricing makes the base price salient and the fees invisible until the last step, which is why several regulators now require all-in pricing up front.
- Making a benefit loud and its condition quiet, such as a large free trial banner and a small auto-renewal line, is deception by typography.
- Manufacturing salience for a risk that does not exist, to push people toward a paid add-on, is fear selling.
Where you have seen it
Booking platforms with all-in pricing
Cleaning and service fees are folded into the displayed nightly price, so the list can be compared without opening each listing.
Apple App Store privacy nutrition labels
Data collection is summarised on the listing page rather than left inside a linked privacy policy.
Nutri-Score front-of-pack labelling
A single letter grade on the front replaces a nutrition table on the back. Same facts, different position in the decision.
What the research says
- Chetty, Looney and Kroft, 2009 (American Economic Review)Well evidenced
A field experiment posted tax-inclusive prices on supermarket shelves. Demand for those products fell, even though the tax was already being charged at the register and was public knowledge.
A clean field result. The information was available before and after; only its position changed.
- Finkelstein, 2009 (Quarterly Journal of Economics)Mixed evidence
Toll rates rose faster on roads after electronic collection replaced cash, consistent with drivers paying less attention to a charge they no longer hand over.
Observational and open to other explanations, including political economy differences between the roads that adopted early.
- Bordalo, Gennaioli and Shleifer, 2012 (Journal of Political Economy)Mixed evidence
A formal theory in which attention concentrates on attributes that differ most across the options in front of you, which predicts that context changes choices.
Theory with supporting lab evidence. Useful as a lens for why the comparison set matters.
Grades are a judgement about the evidence, not about how useful the idea is. Plenty of contested effects are still worth knowing, as long as you do not cite them as settled.