Choosing what we like vs liking what we choose: How choice-induced preference change might actually be instrumental to decision-making

Abstract

For more than 60 years, it has been known that people report higher (lower) subjective values for items after having selected (rejected) them during a choice task. This phenomenon is coined "choice-induced preference change" or CIPC, and its established interpretation is that of "cognitive dissonance" theory. In brief, if people feel uneasy about their choice, they later convince themselves, albeit not always consciously, that the chosen (rejected) item was actually better (worse) than they had originally estimated. While this might make sense from a pragmatic psychological standpoint, it is challenging from a theoretical evolutionary perspective. This is because such a cognitive mechanism might yield irrational biases, whose adaptive fitness would be unclear. In this work, we assume that CIPC is mostly driven by the refinement of option value representations that occurs during (and not after) difficult choices.This makes CIPC the epiphenomenal outcome of a cognitive process that is instrumental to the decision. Critically, our hypothesis implies novel predictions about how observed CIPC should relate to two specific meta-cognitive processes, namely: choice confidence and subjective certainty regarding pre-choice value judgments. We test these predictions in a behavioral experiment where participants rate the subjective value of food items both before and after choosing between equally valued items; we augment this traditional design with reports of choice confidence and subjective certainty about value judgments. The results confirm our predictions and provide evidence against the standard post-choice cognitive dissonance reduction explanation. We then discuss the relevance of our work in the context of the existing debate regarding the putative cognitive mechanisms underlying cognitive dissonance reduction.

Coherence Shifts in Attribute Evaluations

“…The way in which people process information during decision making may be subject to metacognitive control (e.g., Chaxel, 2015), which may lead to rational inattention to different attributes in different choice contexts (Sims, 2003;Caplin & Dean, 2015). The magnitude of shifts in overall evaluations of options tends to increase with the difficulty of the decision (Svenson, 1992), thereby increasing confidence in the choice (Simon, Snow & Read, 2004;Simon & Spiller, 2016;Lee & Daunizeau, 2020a). However, previous studies relating choice difficulty to the magnitude of coherence shifts have not assessed potential changes in the perceived values of those individual attributes that are hypothesized to determine overall value.…”

“…An increased coherence shift for high disparity choices would in turn increase choice confidence and decrease response time (RT), as the choice effectively becomes easier (cf. Lee & Daunizeau, 2020a).…”

“…In accord with their statistical hypothesis, they found a significant level of CIPC even in this control condition, thus proving their point. However, a number of subsequent studies have shown that CIPC in the standard RCR condition is significantly higher than in the RRC condition, suggesting that choosing between options does indeed cause CICP beyond what can be explained by statistical considerations (Lee & Daunizeau, 2020a;Chammat et al, 2017;Salti et al, 2014;Coppin et al, 2014;Sharot et al, 2012).…”

Computational modeling of Choice-Induced Preference Change: A Reinforcement-Learning-based approach

“…In the context of studies of cognitive dissonance theory in CIPC, it has been debated when the preference change occurs, during the choice phase or during the post-choice subjective rating phase. Lee and Daunizeau [10] indicated that the process of restoring cognitive consistency occurs during the decision process rather than during the post-ratings. In addition, Nakao et al [12] reported a link between CIPC and brain activity around 400 ms after choice.…”

“…Recently, choice-based learning (CBL) has been proposed to describe the CIPC phenomenon [9][10][11][12][13], in which the values of both the chosen and rejected items are updated as if the own choice is regarded as a correct answer. The CBL model was first proposed by Akaishi et al [9] and revealed the tendency of people to make the same decision on perceptually ambiguous stimuli without feedback.…”