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Not Just for Consumers: Context Effects Are Fundamental to Decision Making

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 08:13 authored by Trueblood, JS, Brown, SD, Heathcote, A, Busemeyer, JR
Context effects—preference changes that depend on the availability of other options—have attracted a great deal of attention among consumer researchers studying high-level decision tasks. In the experiments reported here, we showed that these effects also arise in simple perceptual-decision-making tasks. This finding casts doubt on explanations limited to consumer choice and high-level decisions, and it indicates that context effects may be amenable to a general explanation at the level of the basic decision process. We demonstrated for the first time that three important context effects from the preferential-choice literature—similarity, attraction, and compromise effects—all occurred within a single perceptual-decision task. Not only do our results challenge previous explanations for context effects proposed by consumer researchers, but they also challenge the choice rules assumed in theories of perceptual decision making.

History

Publication title

Psychological Science

Volume

24

Issue

6

Pagination

901- 908

ISSN

0956-7976

Department/School

Tasmanian School of Medicine

Publisher

Blackwell Publishers

Place of publication

350 Main Street, Ste 6, Malden, USA, Ma, 02148

Rights statement

Copyright 2013 The Author(s)

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in psychology

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