Some of the toughest decisions in life are so-called 'should vs. want' decisions: you know that you should be exercising at the gym, but you would rather go to the movies with friends. It is not that people don't know what they should be doing, they simply behave in a seemingly irrational manner when faced with tempting consumption opportunities. The authors introduce the Theory of Decision Points, which suggests that external interventions can help individuals curb excessive consumption by providing them with an opportunity to pause and think about consumption. They show that in the case of individuals who are seeking to control consumption, decision points can snap them out of an automatic mode to a more deliberative decision-making mode.

The authors describe their research, which found that when a quantity of a given resource - such as food, money, or cigarettes - is physically divided into smaller quantities, it reduces both the total quantity consumed and the speed of consumption. For marketers, these results suggest that simple forms of packaging have the ability to create dramatic variations in consumption. For consumers, the message is simple - for consumption that you want to control (but that is tempting), the simple act of partitioning the resource will help curb consumption.