A joint examination of effects of decision task type and construal level on the attraction effect

Abstract

The attraction effect refers to a situation in which adding an inferior alternative to a choice set increases the share of the relatively dominating alternative. This research posits that decision task type affect the attraction effect. People usually seek justification for their decisions. In a selection (or rejection) task, they are more likely to emphasize the positive (or negative) features of each option. The addition of an asymmetrically dominated decoy to a binary set of options undoubtedly provides an extra positive feature for the dominant option, and therefore induces a greater attraction effect. Contrarily, in a rejection task condition, the decoy in the trinary set seems to be the worst option and would be eliminated first, and the remaining comparison is identical with the original binary condition. Therefore, the attraction effect may decrease. Besides, the decision task type interacts with the construal level to affect the attraction effect. Specifically, a low construal level, compared with a high construal level, dampens the attraction effect to a greater extent in a rejection task than in a selection task. Results from three experiments support the proposed hypotheses.