The Impact Of Presentation Order On Attraction And Repulsion Effects In Decision-Making

One of the most interesting findings in multialternative, multiattribute choice is the occurrence of "context effects," where the relative preference between two alternatives is influenced by a third, decoy alternative. Although context effects have been well documented, the circumstances necessary for them to occur is a puzzle. Sometimes, the effects disappear or reverse, suggesting they are fragile. We hypothesize this fragility is partly due to a sequential comparison process where subsets of options are compared and evaluated during deliberation. Thus, manipulating the comparison of options (by manipulating presentation order of options) should influence the manifestation of these effect. We test this hypothesis in two ways for the attraction effect. First, we develop a temporally sequential version of a well-established perceptual context effects paradigm, where participants only see 1 alternative at a time. Results show that presentation order strongly influences choices. In some orders, a standard attraction effect occurs and in others, a reversal (or "repulsion") effect occurs. A piecewise extension of the Multiattribute Linear Ballistic Accumulator model explains our results by showing how forgetting (due to the sequential presentation) influences the comparison of options. Quantitative fitting demonstrates that the model explains well the data, outperforming alternative heuristic models. Second, we reanalyze attraction effect data from Trueblood et al. (2015) where the spatial order of options was manipulated. Similar to the sequential task, results show a complex pattern of attraction and repulsion effects. Taken together, these results indicate that a malleable comparison process contributes to the fragility of context effects.