Decomposing preferences into predispositions and evaluations

When making decisions, people can be influenced by the context (or framing) of the decisions in addition to the features of the choice options. It has recently been argued that people can use context to develop predispositions toward certain categories (or types) of options. This research has shown that predispositions increase the efficiency of the choice process by reducing the need for in-depth evaluation of the features but that they also bias choice. Here, we experimentally studied the dynamics of predispositions and their link to evaluations. In our first experiment, using real choices between healthy and unhealthy foods, we found that predispositions arise whenever one category is made to appear generally better than the other, regardless of the specific features of the options in a given decision. We found that predispositions toward healthy and unhealthy foods can be altered but that people's favorable evaluations of healthy foods persist. In our second experiment, we induced changes in both predispositions and evaluations. We again found that predispositions evolve in response to subjects' choice biases while evaluations do not. These changes occur over very short periods of time, highlighting the malleability of people's predispositions. Our findings provide a framework for understanding the factors that affect preferences and for attributing them to context-dependent predispositions or decision-level evaluations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).