Context effects on choice under cognitive load

Wedell, Douglas H.; Hayes, William M.; Verma, Mansi

doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02113-0

Cited by 4 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…It should be noted that the effect of presentation order for The present study compares choice preferences using a withinsubjects design that maintained the same core alternatives while manipulating which core alternative is targeted by the decoy. This design is well-established in the literature (Evans et al, 2021;Pettibone & Wedell, 2007;Trueblood, 2012;Wedell, 1991;Wedell et al, 2022) and is a strong manipulation for amplifying the power to detect context effects. This within-subjects design is further strength- In today's market, where consumers have access to massive choice sets through online shopping platforms such as Amazon, the present study shows that we are still susceptible to adaptive heuristics, such as dominance valuing, that may generate the attraction effect; however, these effects may not play as large of a role compared with decisions among choice sets with fewer alternatives.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This design allows for (a) testing of preference reversals at the individual level, (b) modeling individuals, and (c) generalizing effects across multiple stimulus configurations. We chose to base our stimuli on the grocery shopping task used by Wedell et al (2022) because those stimuli provided large preference reversals at the ternary choice level for attraction and compromise decoys and thus would provide a powerful test of changes in preference reversals with manipulations of number of alternatives and their arrangement. Other design choices included comparing choice when the decoy favored option A versus option B rather than comparing with control condition with no decoys.…”

Section: Choice Of a Within-subjects Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stimuli were based on those used by Wedell et al (2022). Further information about how the stimuli were constructed can be found in Supporting Information S1.…”

Section: Materials and Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Impact of choice set complexity on decoy effects

Stanley,

Wedell

2024

Behavioral Decision Making

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Studies of contextual choice typically use three option choice sets to evaluate how preference relations depend on the values of a third decoy option. However, often real‐world decisions are made using choice sets with many more than three alternatives, such as in online shopping. Three experiments tested for attraction and compromise decoy effects in choice sets that varied the number and ordering of alternatives using a within‐subjects preferential choice grocery shopping task. In Experiment 1, attraction and compromise effects were significantly reduced as alternatives increased from three to nine. Experiment 2 found significantly greater attraction effects in nine alternative choice sets ordered by attributes compared with a random ordering. Experiment 3 used eye tracking and found significant attraction effects in choice sets with 3, 9, and 15 alternatives, but the effect was reduced with increasing alternatives. Eye tracking revealed that participants engaged in more by‐dimension comparisons as the number of alternatives increased, but, contrary to previous research, the proportion of by‐alternative to by‐dimension transitions was not linearly predictive of decoy effects. With increased alternatives, the proportion of the total information attended to decreased, leading to worse choice outcomes, and participants were more likely to engage in a lexicographic decision‐making strategy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Choice Of a Within-subjects Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Impact of choice set complexity on decoy effects

Stanley,

Wedell

2024

Behavioral Decision Making

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“…However, to avoid oversimplifying the interpretation of context effects in terms of dual systems theories, it should be kept in mind that such effects have proved to affect preferences at different stages of the decision processes: therefore, multiple, distinctive cognitive processes could contribute to the preference reversal observed in AE. Indeed, according to the latest interpretations, classifying AE as the result of system 1 or system 2 provides at best a caricature of its mechanisms, whereas a deeper investigation of the dynamic sampling processes would be more useful for understanding the underlying cognitive mechanisms (Wedell et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lastly, also the implications of dual-process theories for context effects have been explored. According to some authors, AE would result from a decisional process managed by the automatic and intuitive system 1 with no sense of voluntary control (Hu & Yu, 2014;Wedell, 2015): In support of this hypothesis, it is worth noting that depletion of cognitive resources was shown to strengthen AE (Pocheptsova et al, 2009;Tsuzuki et al, 2019), whereas in a recent study (Wedell et al, 2022), cognitive load had no effect on AE elicitation and perceived subjective difficulty of the task was positively correlated with magnitude of the decoy effect and an increase in response times (for a similar result on response times, see Marini et al, 2020), thus suggesting that AE is relatively immune to deliberate correction via system 2 processing.…”

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confidence: 94%

There is more to attraction than meets the eye: Studying decoy‐induced attention allocation without eye tracking

Marini

Sapienza

Paglieri

2022

Behavioral Decision Making

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Context effects in decision making refer to any influence on options evaluation resulting from its relational properties with other available alternatives. Over the last 40 years, a large corpus of research showed that decision makers are sensitive to irrelevant options and tend to modify their preferences depending on choice architecture. The attraction effect is a well-known example of context effect, which describes an increase in preferences for an option when a dominated alternative is inserted in the choice set. Sequential sampling models (SSM) interpret decision biases as the result of a dynamic comparative process between the available options that alters subjective values attribution. Recently, SSM received empirical support from eye-tracking studies that documented a decoy-dependent allocation of attention. In this study, we integrate previous process-tracing results using a new hidden-attribute protocol, in which decision makers have to explore products' attributes, keep in mind their values, and deliberately compare the options. This new methodology allows this study to offer additional evidence on the role of decoys in the dynamic process of choice. In a consumer-choice task, the addition of an asymmetrically dominated decoy first focused the attention on the target during attributes exploration, which in turn led to an increase in the dominant option preferences at the choice stage. This suggests that adding irrelevant options affects the information sampling procedures, insofar as the comparative process is influenced by the dominance relationship of the alternatives. These results are consistent with past eye-tracking studies and verify previous connectionist theories of the attraction effect.

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An integrative review of the decoy effect on choice behavior

Padamwar,

Dawra

2024

Psychology and Marketing

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Since 1982, the decoy effect has been one of consumer behavior literature's most discussed and documented phenomena. It has several managerial implications in gaining strategic advantages, such as product management and profit maximization. Numerous attempts have been made to explain the decoy effect. However, there is no clear consensus in the literature regarding the underlying mechanism of the decoy effect. This paper presents a systematic literature review to integrate the four decades of decoy effect research. We analyze the contribution of literature, establish linkages between them, and provide a holistic view of understanding the decoy effect that is beneficial for academicians and practitioners. We discuss and differentiate four types of decoy alternatives that produce three types of decoy effects: attraction effect, compromise effect, and phantom decoy effect. We provide a comprehensive list of moderating factors of the decoy effect. Further, we critically review and integrate various explanatory models to better understand the underlying mechanism of the decoy effect. Finally, we discuss several promising avenues for future research.

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Context effects on choice under cognitive load

Cited by 4 publications

References 36 publications

Impact of choice set complexity on decoy effects

Impact of choice set complexity on decoy effects

There is more to attraction than meets the eye: Studying decoy‐induced attention allocation without eye tracking

An integrative review of the decoy effect on choice behavior

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