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The attraction effect in decision making refers to how preferences are influenced by an inferior option in the choice set. Recent studies challenged the robustness of attraction effect by manipulating the distance between decoy and target in perceptual decision-making tasks. However, previous manipulation of the distance was not comprehensive and systematic enough. Whether the influence of distance between decoy and target on attraction effect would occur in high-level decisions remains unclear. The present study conducted five experiments (two on perceptual decisions and three on preferential decisions) where the distance of the decoy to the target option was systematically manipulated. We found that the distance of the decoy to the target systematically changes the strength and the direction of the attraction effect and sometimes causes its opposite: repulsion effect. Specifically, such change of the context effect (from attraction to repulsion) follows a U-shape function (technically regarding the relative choice share of the target option [RST] as a function of the target-decoy distance), which is in the shape of convex in the perceptual decisions but concave in the domain of preferential decisions. Our findings show how the distance of decoy to target influences the robustness of attraction effect in preferential and perceptual decisions.

Are beauty and goodness the same? The relationship between beauty and goodness has long been a controversial issue in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, ethics and psychology. Although many empirical studies have explored moral judgment and aesthetic judgment separately, only a few studies have compared the two. Whether these two judgments are two different processes or the same process with two different labels remains unclear. To answer this question, the present study directly compared the influence of facial attractiveness on judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty and revealed distinct contributions of imaging perceptions to these two judgments. The results showed that in the moral beauty judgment task, participants gave higher scores to characters with attractive faces compared with characters with unattractive faces, and larger P200 and LPP were elicited in the unattractive-face condition compared with the attractive-face condition; while in the moral goodness judgment task, there was no significant difference between the two conditions of either behaviour or ERP data. These findings offer important insights into the understanding and comparison of the processes of moral judgment and aesthetic judgment.

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