The Stability of Preferences ? A Social-Cognition View

Abstract

Attitudes guide behavior. The social-cognitive approach to decision-making has been building on this assumption for almost a century (Allport, 1935). In this field, the model of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1974) was probably the most influential advance in describ-ing the relation between attitudes and behavior. Accordingly, attitudes are the key predictor of behavioral intentions. They are formally described as a function of a linear integration of evaluations and prob-abilities (beliefs). The attitudinal part of the model dovetails with the subjectively expected-utility (SEU) approach to risky decision-making (Edwards, 1954). In line with attitude–behavior models, preferences are stable attitudes toward behaviors.After its formation, an attitude can be stored in memory in association with the attitude object (e.g., Fazio, 1990; Wilson et al., 2000; Betsch, 2005). Attitude stor-age opens the path to stability. If a person re-encounters an attitude object, she can look up her attitude in memory and use it for subsequent judgment and choice. Individual preferences should be stable to the extent that the person relies on stored attitudes.This so-called “file-drawer” notion (Wilson and Hodges, 1992), however, has been challenged by empirical evidence. Attitudinal responses in risky and non-risky choice domains were shown to be susceptible to a variety of task conditions. Krosnick and Schuman (1988) showed that response order, question wording and for-mat systematically affect attitude judgments irrespective of their subjective importance, extremity, and certainty. In a similar vein, empirical violations of the axioms of deci-sion theory challenged the notion that preferences are stable (e.g., framing effect, Tversky and Kahneman, 1981).The