When less is more: how affect influences preferences when comparing low and high risk options

Recent research involving the evaluability hypothesis has focused on how the presentation of hard to evaluate or easy to evaluate attributes influences preferences for options in either separate or joint evaluations. One explanation for the weight that an attribute carries during a decision is related to the ease with which the value of that attribute can be mapped into an affective frame of reference. In other words, affect helps a decision maker to attach meaning to information, which in turn, influences their ability to use it during judgment. Merging themes from evaluability with those from studies of affect and affective heuristics, however, raises an important question: If enhanced evaluability is explained by making the attributes of an option more or less meaningful in the context of choice, can the affective characteristics of the context of the evaluation counteract any gains achieved through presenting alternatives in side by side comparisons? Two experiments were conducted in an attempt to answer this question. Subjects in both experiments received quantitative information about the nature of risks associated with two problems – one whose context was affect-poor combined with relatively high risks and another whose context was affect-rich combined with relatively low risks. In both experiments, subjects largely ignored the quantitative information presented about the risks and instead focused on the affective characteristics of the problem context when making their choices. This pattern of choice and preference behavior was consistent across both separate and joint evaluations. The results suggest that despite expected gains in evaluability, which should be brought on by side-by-side comparisons, affective responses to a stimulus may overwhelm analytic computations that are also necessary during decision making.