Mary Frances Luce

Constructive Consumer Choice Processes

Consumer decision making has been a focal interest in consumer research, and consideration of current marketplace trends ( e.g., technological change, an information explosion) indicates that this topic will continue to be critically important. We argue that consumer choice is inherently constructive. Due to limited processing capacity, consumers often do not have well-defined existing preferences, but construct them using a variety of strategies contingent on task demands. After describing constructive choice, consumer decision tasks, and decision strategies, we provide an integrative framework for understanding constructive choice, review evidence for constructive consumer choice in light of that framework, and identify knowledge gaps that suggest opportunities for additional research. Copyright 1998 by the University of Chicago.

Choice Processing in Emotionally Difficult Decisions

Choice conflicts between ones important values may cause negative emotion. This article extends the standard effort-accuracy approach to explaining task influences on decision processing by arguing that coping goals will interact with effort minimization and accuracy maximization goals for negatively emotion-laden decision tasks. These coping goals may involve both a desire to process in a thorough, accurate manner and a desire to avoid particularly distressing aspects of processing. On the basis of this extended framework, the authors hypothesized and found in 3 experiments that decision processing under increasing negative emotion both becomes more extensive and proceeds more by focusing on one attribute at a time. In particular, increased negative emotion leads to more attribute-based processing at the beginning of the decision process. The results are inconsistent with views that negative emotion acts only as an incentive or only as a source of decision complexity. Individuals make decisions by using a wide variety of processing strategies, ranging from normative procedures that process all relevant information and explicitly consider trade-offs between attributes to more heuristic procedures that use information selectively and avoid trade-offs between attributes. For a number of years, behavioral decision research has addressed how properties of choice tasks influence these decision-processing strategies (Einhom & Hogarth, 1981; Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1992). Decision makers are often depicted as deciding how to decide on the basis of trade-offs between the accuracy of various decision strategies and the cognitive effort required to implement those strategies. Thus, research has investigated both the factors affecting the relative effort needed for various strategies (e.g., task complexity, information format, and response mode) and the factors influencing the relative accuracy of various rules or the importance of making an accurate decision (e.g., correlation among attributes and incentives; see Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993, for a review).

Emotional trade-off difficulty and choice.

In this article, the authors explore whether choice patterns are sensitive to the potential of relevant trade-offs to elicit negative emotion. Across three experiments, decision makers increasingly...

Separate neural mechanisms underlie choices and strategic preferences in risky decision making.

Adaptive decision making in real-world contexts often relies on strategic simplifications of decision problems. Yet, the neural mechanisms that shape these strategies and their implementation remain largely unknown. Using an economic decision-making task, we dissociate brain regions that predict specific choices from those predicting an individuals preferred strategy. Choices that maximized gains or minimized losses were predicted by functional magnetic resonance imaging activation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex or anterior insula, respectively. However, choices that followed a simplifying strategy (i.e., attending to overall probability of winning) were associated with activation in parietal and lateral prefrontal cortices. Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, through differential functional connectivity with parietal and insular cortex, predicted individual variability in strategic preferences. Finally, we demonstrate that robust decision strategies follow from neural sensitivity to rewards. We conclude that decision making reflects more than compensatory interaction of choice-related regions; in addition, specific brain systems potentiate choices depending on strategies, traits, and context.

Correlation, conflict, and choice

We examined the degree to which individuals adapt their decision processes to the degree of interattribute correlation and conflict characterizing a decision problem. On the basis of an effort-accuracy framework for adaptive decision making, we predicted that the more negatively correlated the attribute structure, the more people will use strategies that process much of the relevant information and make trade-offs. A computer simulation study supported these predictions, and two experiments using process-tracing techniques to monitor information acquisition indicated that individuals did indeed respond to interattribute correlation by shifting their processing strategies in ways that are adaptive according to the effort-accuracy framework

Boundary Conditions on Unconscious Thought in Complex Decision Making

Should individuals delegate thinking about complex choice problems to the unconscious? We tested two boundary conditions on this suggestion. First, we found that in a decision environment similar to those studied previously, self-paced conscious thought and unconscious thought had similar advantages over conscious thought constrained to a long fixed time interval in terms of identifying the option with the highest number of positive outcomes. Second, we found that self-paced conscious thought performed better than unconscious thought in a second decision environment where performance depended to a greater extent on magnitudes of the attributes. Thus, we argue that it is critical to take into account the interaction of forms of processing with task demands (choice environments) when considering how to approach complex choice problems.

High Stakes Decision Making: Normative, Descriptive and Prescriptive Considerations

This paper reviews the state of the art of research on individual decision-making in high-stakes, low-probability settings. A central theme is that resolving high-stakes decisions optimally poses a formidable challenge not only to naïve decision makers, but also to users of more sophisticated tools, such as decision analysis. Such decisions are difficult to make because precise information about probabilities is not available, and the dynamics of the decision are complex. When faced with such problems, naïve decision-makers fall prey to a wide range of potentially harmful biases, such as failing to recognize a high-stakes problem, ignoring the information about probabilities that does exist, and responding to complexity by accepting the status quo. A proposed agenda for future research focuses on how the process and outcomes of high-stakes decision making might be improved.

The Concept of Voluntary Consent

Our primary focus is on analysis of the concept of voluntariness, with a secondary focus on the implications of our analysis for the concept and the requirements of voluntary informed consent. We propose that two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must be satisfied for an action to be voluntary: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. We reject authenticity as a necessary condition of voluntary action, and we note that constraining situations may or may not undermine voluntariness, depending on the circumstances and the psychological capacities of agents. We compare and evaluate several accounts of voluntariness and argue that our view, unlike other treatments in bioethics, is not a value-laden theory. We also discuss the empirical assessment of individuals’ perceptions of the degrees of noncontrol and self-control. We propose use of a particular Decision Making Control Instrument. Empirical research using this instrument can provide data that will help establish appropriate policies and procedures for obtaining voluntary consent to research.

Decision Making as Coping

This article reviews a model of emotional trade-off difficulty in decision making. The model argues that decision makers are motivated to cope with the negative emotion associated with decision-processing operations, notably emotion generated by explicit trade-offs between highly valued attributes. The article begins to explore implications of this model for patient decision making in the cancer control domain. For instance, the model points to emotional reactions to decisions as both a cost and a barrier in the move toward greater patient participation in health care decision making.

Appraising the Appraisal-Tendency Framework

This article considers the consumer research implications of the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF; Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007). This article outlines how the ATF approach could be applied to sequential consumer choices (e.g., effects of emotional responses to stockouts on later decisions) and high-stakes decisions (e.g., medical decisions). This article also proposes several areas in which the ATF might be extended: examining complex sequences of choices with emotional consequences, considering how incidental and integral emotions interact, characterizing how both evaluative and regulatory mechanisms may influence the effects of emotion on judgment and choice, and extending the range of positive emotions and appraisal dimensions considered.