The Influence Of Within-Alternative And Within-Dimension Similarity On Context Effects

Context effects such as the attraction, compromise, and similarity effects demonstrate that a comparison process, that is, a method of comparing dimension values, plays an important role in choice behavior. Recent research suggests that this same comparison process, made more flexible by allowing for a variety of comparisons, may provide an elegant account of observed correlations between context effects by differentially highlighting dimension-level and alternative-level stimulus characteristics. Thus, the primary goal of the present study is to explore alternative- and dimension-level stimulus properties that promote the attraction, compromise, and similarity effects. The results suggest that increasing a dimension-level property, spread, promotes the attraction and compromise effects and reduces the similarity effect, whereas increasing an alternative-level property, dispersion, introduces an alternative-level bias that influences choice in concert with the decoy. The present work therefore provides new insights into the stimulus properties underlying context-dependent choice behavior and provides important new constraints for theoretical models that seek to account for such behavior.