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The fragile nature of contextual preference reversals: Reply to Tsetsos, Chater, and Usher (2015)

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 13:22 authored by Trueblood, JS, Brown, SD, Heathcote, A
Trueblood, Brown, and Heathcote (2014) developed a new model, called the multiattribute linear ballistic accumulator (MLBA), to explain contextual preference reversals in multialternative choice. MLBA was shown to provide good accounts of human behavior through both qualitative analyses and quantitative fitting of choice data. Tsetsos, Chater, and Usher (2015) investigated the ability of MLBA to simultaneously capture 3 prominent context effects (attraction, compromise, and similarity). They concluded that MLBA must set a "fine balance" of competing forces to account for all 3 effects simultaneously and that its predictions are sensitive to the position of the stimuli in the attribute space. Through a new experiment, we show that the 3 effects are very fragile and that only a small subset of people shows all 3 simultaneously. Thus, the predictions that Tsetsos et al. generated from the MLBA model turn out to match closely real data in a new experiment. Support for these predictions provides strong evidence for the MLBA. A corollary is that a model that can "robustly" capture all 3 effects simultaneously is not necessarily a good model. Rather, a good model captures patterns found in human data, but cannot accommodate patterns that are not found.

History

Publication title

Psychological Review

Volume

122

Issue

4

Pagination

848-853

ISSN

0033-295X

Department/School

Tasmanian School of Medicine

Publisher

Amer Psychological Assoc

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

Copyright 2015 American Psychological Association

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in psychology

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