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Many of society's most significant social decisions are made over sets of individuals: for example, evaluating a collection of job candidates when making a hiring decision. Rational theories of choice dictate that decision makers' preferences between any two options should remain the same irrespective of the number or quality of other options. Yet people's preferences for each option in a choice set shift in predictable ways as function of the available alternatives. These violations are well documented in consumer behavior contexts: for example, the decoy effect, in which introducing a third inferior product changes consumers' preferences for two original products. The current experiments test the efficacy of social decoys and harness insights from computational models of decision-making to examine whether choice set construction can be used to change preferences in a hiring context. Across seven experiments (N = 6312) we find that participants have systematically different preferences for the exact same candidate as a function of the other candidates in the choice set (Experiments 1a-1d, 2) and the salience of the candidate attributes under consideration (Experiments 2, 3a, 3b). Specifically, compromise and (often) asymmetric-dominance decoys increased relative preference for their yoked candidates when candidates were counterstereotypical (e.g., high warmth/low competence male candidate). More importantly, we demonstrate for the first time that we can mimic the effect of a decoy in the absence of a third candidate by manipulating participants' exposure to candidates' attributes: balanced exposure to candidates' warmth and competence information significantly reduced bias between the two candidates. (PsycINFO Database Record

Decision-makers consistently exhibit violations of rational choice theory when they choose among several alternatives in a set (e.g., failing to buy the best product in a set when it is presented alongside high-quality alternatives). Many of society's most significant social decisions similarly involve the joint evaluation of multiple candidates. Are social decisions subject to the same violations, and if so, what account best characterizes the nature of the violations? Across five studies, we tested whether decision-makers exhibit context-dependent preferences in hiring scenarios and past U.S. congressional race outcomes and compared different models of value coding as sources of the hypothesized context-dependence. Studies 1a, 1b, and 1d revealed that a divisive normalization value coding scheme best characterized participants' choices across a series of hiring decisions, and that participants exhibited contextdependent preferences. However, the distractor had the opposite effect of that predicted by divisive normalization once we accounted for the random effect of participant: as the value of the distractor increased, participants were more likely to hire the highest-valued candidate. In Study 2, we used a combination of archival electoral data and survey data to examine whether normalization models could explain the outcomes of congressional elections. Electoral outcomes were predicted by political candidates' inferred competence, but this time in line with the divisive normalization account. Our findings offer mixed support for a formal, neurobiologically-derived account of when and how specific alternatives exert their effects on social evaluation and choice and highlight conditions under which high-value distractors increase versus decrease relative choice accuracy.

Many of society's most significant social decisions are made over sets of individuals: for example, evaluating a collection of job candidates when making a hiring decision. Rational theories of choice dictate that decision makers' preferences between any two options should remain the same irrespective of the number or quality of other options. Yet people's preferences for each option in a choice set shift in predictable ways as function of the available alternatives. These violations are well documented in consumer behavior contexts: for example, the decoy effect, in which introducing a third inferior product changes consumers' preferences for two original products. The current experiments test the efficacy of social decoys and harness insights from computational models of decision-making to examine whether choice set construction can be used to change preferences in a hiring context. Across seven experiments (N = 6312) we find that participants have systematically different preferences for the exact same candidate as a function of the other candidates in the choice set (Experiments 1a-1d, 2) and the salience of the candidate attributes under consideration (Experiments 2, 3a, 3b). Specifically, compromise and (often) asymmetric-dominance decoys increased relative preference for their yoked candidates when candidates were counter-stereotypical (e.g., high warmth/low competence male candidate). More importantly, we demonstrate for the first time that we can mimic the effect of a decoy in the absence of a third candidate by manipulating participants' exposure to candidates' attributes: balanced exposure to candidates' warmth and competence information significantly reduced bias between the two candidates.