Another look at reasons for choosing and rejecting

Abstract

Students indicated which of two options they would choose or reject in a between-subjects task-frame manipulation. Alternatives had either high or low variability of feature values, corresponding to enriched and impoverished alternatives, respectively. Previous research has yielded mixed results of task framing, with Shafir (1993) demonstrating greater preference for the enriched alternative in choice than rejection but Ganzach (1995) demonstrating the opposite result. An accentuation model explained these differences by postulating that the greater demands for justification in the choice task lead to accentuation of differences between alternatives in choice. The accentuation model was tested against weight-change models in two experiments, one using various decision scenarios and the other using four- trait adjective descriptions of potential roommates. Results were consistent with accentuation theory and inconsistent with a systematic change in weighting of positive and negative attributes across choice and rejection tasks.