Minimum Familiarity: None (you just need to know what a theme park is!)
Theme park designers aim to transport their guests to another world. To achieve this lofty objective, they rely on techniques that derive from a deep understanding of human behavior. The importance of how real people perceive and respond to the choices presented to them has been an object of study among theme park designers since modern theme parks emerged in the 1950s. It has taken much longer for economics, a field that claims to study the choices humans make, to work its way to an understanding of what theme park designers realized way back then.
But the economists did eventually find their way there. Today, the academic understanding of how human psychology influences decision-making explains many of the techniques theme park designers have long employed. Ahead, we’ll explore a couple examples of theme park design tools and the behavioral concepts that explain why they work.
Where Am I Going?
The focus of a theme park designer is entirely on how you (a hypothetical guest) will experience their creation. And when you arrive at a theme park, there are a few states of mind that you may arrive in. You may have traveled here for the express purpose of getting on a new attraction. Or maybe your kids wanted to go so you went to incredible fiscal and logistical lengths to make it happen. Or you’re an annual passholder and you’re here for half a day to hang out with your friends.
Your needs will be different depending on which headspace you arrive in. Theme parks are designed to meet you where you are and accommodate how you want to make decisions for your day at the park.
Theme park designers categorize guests as exhibiting either purposeful or purposeless movement through a park (Younger 252). Designers employ distinct tools to accommodate both types of movement, often without a guest noticing they’re being influenced at all.
Anchors
Anchors facilitate purposeful movement through a theme park. An anchor is something that a guest knows they want to do. In Theme Park Design & the Art of Themed Entertainment, David Younger writes that anchors tend to be “the attractions guests rush to first thing when the park opens” (Younger 252). At Disneyland, for example, anchor attractions include Indiana Jones Adventure, Space Mountain, and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. They’re the marquee experiences that you’ll remember long after you leave the park.
Wienies
I know that since you saw the title of this post you’ve been wondering what wienies have to do with any of this. Believe it or not, this versatile word has yet another meaning distinct to the world of theme park design. A weenie in a theme park is a “visual magnet,” per a definition from legendary theme park designer John Hench (Younger 252). More specifically, a weenie is a “visually interesting and intriguing sight that compels guests to head towards it, pulling them into a new area of the park” (Younger 252). Contrary to anchors, wienies are all about purposeless movement. They serve as visual reference points around which guests often orient their navigation.
Part of the charm of wienies for designers is that they pull people away from areas that tend to bottleneck, like park entrance plazas and central walkways. Guests also benefit from the resulting traffic patterns, as less crowding makes for a more enjoyable experience.
Most theme parks have at least one iconic weenie. Here are a few classic examples:
- The castle in any Disney magic kingdom park around the world
- The central Skytower in SeaWorld San Diego and Orlando parks
- The EPCOT sphere
- The volcano at Tokyo DisneySea
- Hogwarts castle in various Universal parks (you could argue these are more like anchors than wienies in some cases, but they certainly share many of the key weenie characteristics)
As you can tell, theme park wienies tend to be large in scale and resemble a recognizable icon. Some of the examples above are straight out of the intellectual property (IP) associated with a theme park, while others may mimic the majesty of nature or the design of real-world landmarks. Still others (like the EPCOT sphere) are purely imagined and exclusive to a given theme park.
I Can’t Decide
As threatened at the beginning of this post, economics (and specifically the sub-field of behavioral economics) has a lot to say about why anchors and wienies so effectively help humans navigate a theme park. To illustrate this, let’s consider how economists would approach a decision that all theme park designers have to make:
Consider guests arriving at your theme park and making a decision about what they want to do first. How should we communicate to our guests what their options are?
Technically, there are hundreds of activities to choose from: rides, shows, walk-throughs, restaurants, etc. Let’s start with the lowest-effort option for presenting these choices to guests: we could show guests the one option that the most guests want to do. Just imagine a big sign pointing the way to that one attraction, and no other guidance.
Guests who do in fact prefer that option will be just fine, but what about those who don’t? Well, there’s no harm in adding a second choice. Those who prefer the most popular option will still see it listed, but now the people who prefer the second-most popular option will also be satisfied.
But what about the third most popular option? The logic above continues indefinitely; adding one more option to the “choice set” is always logical since the people who would prefer that option can now select it, and it doesn’t take away any options from anyone who preferred the options that were already there.
In short, economists historically have believed that humans always benefit from having more options to choose from. Humans theoretically optimize each decision they make. If we’re rational decision makers, then more information will either be neutral or beneficial to us, but it can’t hurt.
But I think we all agree that the decision that maximizes the number of choices presented to our theme park guests in this scenario is not the best outcome.
In a park with 10 attractions, the sign above gives you all of the possible options so that you can optimize how you spend your limited time in the theme park. This is the old-school economist solution. It is also quite clearly a terrible idea, and it’s an example of a phenomenon known as choice overload.
Choice Overload (and Jam)
Choice overload “describes how people get overwhelmed when they are presented with many options,” per The Decision Lab. This phenomenon extends to other (arguably more important) parts of our lives as well, such as choices related to careers, relationships, places we live, etc. But for our purposes here, what matters is that choice overload really does impact the ability of humans to make smart decisions. Humans are not, in reality, computers that can intake all the available options and run an optimization algorithm to determine the best one for them.
Economists have gradually come to realize this, although not without a lot of bickering along the way. Behavioral economics students are pretty much guaranteed to learn about an iconic experiment involving jam, which was one of the early papers providing experimental evidence that choice overload is real.
The experiment, as described in a 2001 paper (summary here), offered supermarket customers a selection of jams to sample and purchase. In one scenario, the experimenters presented shoppers with six choices of jams, and in another they presented 24 choices. The experiment found two things that theme park designers had already figured out in the 1950s:
- People were more likely to stop to look at the available options when there were 24 of them.
- People were less likely to actually buy any of the jams in the scenarios that presented more choices.
Both of these outcomes are bad news for theme park designers thinking about installing the massive sign above. Translating the jam experiment to the theme park setting, the all-encompassing sign would lead more guests to stop to consider where they want to go (vs. signs with fewer options). Then those guests would be less likely to actually decide where they want to go after they did look at the sign! Now we have congestion around the sign and the guests still don’t know where they want to go.1
A Better Option
Anchors and wienies are tools that reduce choice overload, which is why theme park designers rely on them so much. Instead of employing rudimentary (and “economically efficient”) signs listing the options guests face, theme park designers reduce the overwhelming decision matrix to a higher quantity of choices, each of which has fewer options. This approach to experience design is known as controlled choice (Younger 166).
Wienies are often central and help guests navigate between choice nodes. Don’t know where to go when you walk into Disneyland? Start by walking towards the castle in the distance, and when you reach it you’ll have a few different options arrayed before you in the form of themed lands to explore.
Grouping multiple attractions into “lands” is actually another tool for simplifying decisions, and lands themselves often rely on a central weenie of their own to draw guests in (Younger 253). Guests view the lands as units in themselves that they can choose between. Once guests choose a land and arrive there, they face their next decision about what attraction specifically they want to engage with. Theme park designers often try to simplify this choice as well, breaking up the pathways of a land to have multiple decision points, where you have to make a choice but only between a couple of options at a time (Younger 298).
Each land in a theme park tends to have at least one anchor, which are often the attractions of the largest scale and with the highest capacity. For guests who seek them out, they’re easy to find once you navigate to the correct land, and for guests who are wandering, they draw your attention and interest.
So wienies and anchors work together to simplify the choices you have to make, and this simplification interestingly only adds to the feeling of adventure in a theme park. There are many paths to take, many attractions to return to later, nooks and crannies to explore. These tools encourage purposeful and purposeless movement through theme parks, and behavioral economics tells us that they’re effective because they break otherwise overwhelming decisions into reasonable, bite-sized pieces.
In this clever way, the choice architecture of well-designed theme parks encourages exploration and deliberately avoids overwhelming you with the boundless choices before you.
Works Cited
“The Paradox of Choice.” The Decision Lab, thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-paradox-of-choice. Accessed 11 Feb. 2024.
Younger, David. “Theme Park Layout.” Theme Park Design & the Art of Themed Entertainment, Inklingwood Press, 2016.
- By the way, theme park designers have a term related to the congestion caused by puzzled guests trying to decide what to do. A decision space is an area dedicated for guests to consider complicated questions like which parent gets to ride and which has to stay with the baby or whether that friend is actually too scared to go on the roller coaster or just wants attention (Younger 468). ↩︎
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