Social Inferences from Choice Context: Dominated Options Can Engender Mistrust

Abstract

The details of a decision context — including the set of alternatives being offered — can considerably influence the judgments and choices that people make. For instance, people’s decisions are often influenced by the presence of a dominated option (one that is objectively inferior to one of the alternatives) in a choice set. To understand such “context effects,” previous research has focused on how the composition of a choice set affects the way people attend to options and weigh attributes. We take a complementary approach. Here, we propose that the composition of a choice set signals information about the intentions of the choice architect who designed the choice. Further, we hypothesize that these social inferences can systematically influence decisions. We demonstrate one example of this more general phenomenon across 6 experiments, showing that the inclusion of a dominated option can engender mistrust in the choice architect. This mistrust in turn leads to greater preference for alternative choice providers. We demonstrate these effects using vignette studies as well as incentive-compatible economic games. By studying the effects of dominated options in a new way (i.e., in socially richer situations), we uncover novel psychological and behavioral consequences of choice set composition. We close by considering broader theoretical and practical implications regarding social inferences from choice context.

Keywords: social inferences, context effects, dominated options, trust, choice