Acta Psychologica 125 (2007) 155–174 www.elsevier.com/locate/actpsy
Focusing eVects in predecisional information acquisition Fabio Del Missier a
a,¤
, Donatella Ferrante b, Erica Costantini
b
Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education, University of Trento, via Matteo del Ben 5/B, I-38068, Rovereto (TN), Italy b Department of Psychology, University of Trieste, via S. Anastasio 12, I-34134, Trieste, Italy Received 16 June 2005; received in revised form 3 June 2006; accepted 6 July 2006 Available online 21 August 2006
Abstract Legrenzi et al. [Legrenzi, P., Girotto, V., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1993). Focusing in reasoning and decision making. Cognition, 49, 37–66] showed that when a single option is proposed for consideration the decision makers limit their information acquisition to this one option, failing to take into account potential alternatives. Unfortunately, the evidence supporting this focusing eVect is weak and its determinants are largely unknown. In three experiments, we provided stronger support for the reality of the focusing eVect and we identiWed two signiWcant determinants of this phenomenon. The results show that both representational and value-related manipulations are able to reduce the eVect. Results also suggest the need to distinguish between two diVerent types of focusing: representational focusing and search-related focusing. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. PsycINFO classiWcation: 2340; 2343 Keywords: Focusing; Decision making; Information search; Option generation
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0464 483572; fax: +39 0464 483554. E-mail address:
[email protected] (F. Del Missier).
0001-6918/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2006.07.005
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1. Introduction Imagine you are wandering through a mall. A man stops you and you realize that he is an employee of the mall. He tells you that you have won a 20 Euro coupon that can be used to purchase something in one of the mall stores. He explains that one of the mall’s promotional policies involves distributing a certain number of free coupons to randomly selected visitors. You are very happy with your coupon award, but uncertain about how to spend the money. You take a look around and the Wrst thing you see is a music shop. You then decide to buy a CD of your favorite band. The story ends with you exiting the mall with the CD in your pocket. Now answer the following question: Do you think the story would have ended in a diVerent way if you had taken a few minutes to make a list of all the things you could have bought with the coupon before looking around and noticing the music shop? The results of a study that applied a similar manipulation (Jones, Frisch, Yurak, & Kim, 1998, Experiment 3) suggest that there is a good chance you would have ended up buying something diVerent. This example shows that focusing attention on a single option may lead the decision maker to neglect potentially valuable alternatives. It is easy to think of other real-life situations in which this kind of phenomenon may take place (e.g., when booking a hotel, choosing a restaurant to have dinner at, etc.). From a normative viewpoint (cf. Keeney & RaiVa, 1976), consideration should be given to all of the relevant alternatives in a decision making problem. This rarely happens in the real world, even when a limited number of options should be considered. The diYculty in generating alternatives to the more salient or accessible options has been clearly recognized by the prescriptive approaches to decision making. These approaches warn individuals to avoid “being boxed in with limited alternatives” and suggest a variety of ways of Wguring out alternatives to the more apparent options (cf. Hammond, Keeney, & RaiVa, 1999). In this paper we will deal with the focusing eVect in decision making, which we deWne as not taking into account alternatives to an option that has been initially proposed or generated. In particular, we will provide evidence for the reality of the focusing eVect in three experiments that overcome methodological problems aVecting previous studies. Furthermore, these experiments will show that two diVerent types of manipulations, related to the representation of the decision problem and to the value of the focal option, can reduce focusing. These results contribute to our understanding of the determinants and the processes underlying the eVect. Before describing and discussing our experimental investigations, we will conduct a critical analysis of the previous studies on the focusing eVect. 1.1. The focusing eVect According to Legrenzi, Girotto, and Johnson-Laird (1993, p. 37) decision makers “are likely to restrict their thoughts to what is explicitly represented in their models.” Following a theoretical analysis of the role of the focusing mechanisms in reasoning, Legrenzi et al. also attempted to provide empirical support for a focusing eVect in decision making. In their experiment, they asked a group of participants (control condition) to decide whether or not they wanted to carry out a given activity (e.g., going to a movie). No context information about the decision was provided. The participants were invited to ask the experimenter as much information as needed in order to make their decision. None of the
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participants in this group asked any questions regarding the potential alternatives to the explicitly proposed option (i.e., the focal option). Under a diVerent condition of the same experiment (context), another group of participants were asked to perform the same task, however the choice scenario was enhanced by stating that the participant would visit a very attractive city (e.g., Paris) for a single day and for the Wrst time. Furthermore, the participants were informed that the experimenter had very good Wrsthand knowledge of the local tourist attractions. Seven of the eight participants in the context group asked at least one question concerning the potential alternatives to the focal option. According to Legrenzi et al. (1993), the focusing eVect is closely related to the construction and usage of mental models. Decision makers tend to construct as few explicit models as possible and to focus on the information that is explicitly represented in their models. If a single option is oVered for consideration, it is likely that this will be the sole option that gets explicitly represented in the decision maker’s mental model. Therefore, the information acquisition will probably be limited to this single option. If, on the other hand, the context makes alternatives to the given option more accessible, it is more likely that these alternatives will be included in the decision maker’s mental model and explored during the information search. A diVerent view is held by Cherubini, Mazzocco, and Rumiati (2003). Relying on the relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), they assume that individuals “are strongly inXuenced by the relevance of the available alternatives” (p. 70) and they provide the following informal deWnition of relevance: “the newer, more unexpected, and more surprising a piece of information is, the more informative it is ƒ and the more informative it is, the more relevant it is” (p. 69). On this basis, it is suggested that “the decision-maker will focus on relevant alternatives [regardless of] whether or not they are explicitly mentioned in the problem, searching for information about them and, therefore, building an explicit mental model of them. This tendency would be independent of which alternatives are linguistically explicit in the problem” (p. 69). Cherubini et al. asked their participants to choose between two explicitly stated options (2003, Experiment 2). When a well-known alternative was contrasted with a relatively novel activity (e.g., staying at home vs. going to a movie), the participants asked more questions about the novel activity. This result was interpreted as an indication that people seek information about the more relevant option. Furthermore, if the single option of “staying at home” was speciWed in the text of the problem (Experiment 3: home–not home condition), the participants asked for more information regarding the potential alternatives. According to Cherubini et al., presenting an option in the text of a problem is neither suYcient nor necessary for the participants to focus their attention on that option. Here the importance of the form of the decision problem (i.e., those aspects which are highlighted by the text) gets demoted; whereas this aspect was considered by Legrenzi et al. as an important determinant of the focusing eVect. Applying the notion of relevance along the lines suggested by Oaksford and Chater (1995) would lead to the prediction that individuals are sensitive to information that could change their decision and to the processing eVorts needed to access this information. This means that the decision maker should be sensitive to the value of information, which depends on the relative utility of the options (Howard, 1966). The probability that the decision maker acquires information about the potential alternatives to the focal option will be higher when the possible beneWts of the information acquisition are also high (i.e., when the relative estimated utilities of the alternatives are high).
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Relying on the constructs of bounded rationality and satisWcing (Simon, 1955, 1956, 1957), it is possible to formulate another potential explanation for the focusing behavior. Carrying out an exhaustive information search and integration process on a set of options would require eVortful and error-prone cognitive operations. When the problem is too complex and external memories are not available, an exhaustive search is simply unfeasible. Therefore, when the Wnal goal is not to make the optimal choice but simply to reach an acceptable decision, it is possible that the decision maker would be willing to trade-oV the subjective utility of the selected option and the costs associated with the information acquisition and integration (Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993). This can be achieved by adopting a satisWcing strategy. Therefore, when an option is initially presented, the decision maker may want to explore its most important features in order to see whether they meet a set of personal criteria. If all of the features meet the respective criteria, the decision maker will select this Wrst option without further information acquisition. If, on the contrary, the focal option fails to meet at least one signiWcant criterion, the decision maker will consider the potential alternatives. This approach, in its simplest form, is diVerent from the relevance view. In fact, the application of the satisWcing heuristics does not require that the value of information about potential alternatives to the current option be taken into account, but rather focuses on the compliance of the current option with the decision maker’s criteria. In summary, while the mental model account mainly stresses the importance of the representational variables and processes in the onset of the focusing eVect, the satisWcing and the relevance approaches assign a signiWcant role to value-related variables in information acquisition behavior (the subjective values of the focal option and the relative utility of the alternatives, respectively). 1.2. A critical analysis of the focusing experiments Unfortunately, previous studies on the focusing eVect are aVected by internal and construct validity problems that complicate the interpretation of their results. A basic problem concerns the deWnition of focusing: “Individuals are likely to restrict their thoughts to what is explicitly represented in their models” (Legrenzi et al., 1993, p. 37). This loose deWnition may lead researchers to develop diVerent views of what focusing really is and how the focusing eVect should be measured, with the unfortunate consequence that researchers may end up using the same term (focusing) to denote very diVerent things. Moreover, adopting the presence (or the number) of questions about the alternatives to the focal option as an operational measure is misleading when implicit or explicit alternatives (or the focal option itself) are well-known to the participants. The major problem with previous studies resides in the fact that the text of the decision problem makes reference (directly or indirectly) to options that seem to be well-known to the participants (e.g., “stay at home” or “do my usual stuV”). Asking for information about well-known options is inappropriate from a pragmatic point of view, as this information is already available and readily accessible to the participants. They can easily retrieve from memory the features of a typical evening at home (or in their city) and they may be able to evaluate this without needing to perform any external search. Behavioral research has shown that decision makers often use memorized evaluations as input in making choices (Lynch, Marmorstein, & Weigold, 1988; Wright, 1975) and that they are able to retrieve from memory
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option-attribute information in order to perform comparisons with externally available information (Biehal & Chakravarti, 1983, 1986). If a “silent” comparison with a wellknown option had taken place, the experiments carried out by Legrenzi et al. (1993) and Cherubini et al. (2003, Experiment 1), might not have provided convincing support for the focusing eVect. Moreover, the potential occurrence of silent comparisons with well-known options also complicates the interpretation of the results of other experiments carried out by Cherubini et al. (Experiments 2 and 3: activity–not activity and activity–home conditions). Another problem aVecting the existing experiments is related to the diVerence between the tasks in which the participants are asked to decide whether or not they want to perform a certain activity (opportunity), and the tasks in which they are simply asked to choose one option from a number of activities; however, none of these options has a privileged status (choice). Jones et al. (1998) traced a distinction between these two cases. When the participants are asked whether or not they want to perform a given activity, it is quite likely that the proposed option becomes the natural focus of attention. On the contrary, none of the options has a special status in a choice task, unless the text of the problem is speciWcally designed to lead the decision maker to focus on one of these. The ordinary choice scenario used by Cherubini et al. (2003, Experiments 2 and 3: activity–home and activity–activity conditions) is not able to induce a focusing eVect; it simply oVers a choice between two explicitly proposed options that lie at the same level. In order to solve these methodological problems, we would like to put forward a more precise deWnition of focusing that can be used in opportunity or speciWc choice tasks. We shall state that the decision makers are focused when they do not take into account alternatives to an option that has been initially proposed or generated. This deWnition requires specifying what is meant by “take into account alternatives” to a proposed option. The decision makers take into account potential alternatives when they search for or evaluate information regarding these, through an internal (memory) or external (overt) search or appraisal. Imagine that an individual wants to book a hotel in Oakland, Pittsburgh, and that the focal option (suggested by a friend) is the Wyndham Garden Hotel. If the individual is familiar with the hotels in Pittsburgh, a memory search will suYce to provide information about the potential alternatives (e.g., Holiday Inn, Best Western University Center, etc.). Conversely, when the individual has no knowledge about the hotels in Pittsburgh, an external search will be needed to Wnd out which alternatives exist and what their features are. Based on these considerations, we can state that the decision makers are focused on the given option when: (1) their current representation of the problem does not contain any reference to speciWc alternatives and they do not make any attempt to Wnd out which alternatives exist and what their features are; (2) their current representation of the problem contains one or more references to speciWc alternatives (e.g., the Holiday Inn), but no internal or external search or evaluation of these is carried out. The decision makers are not focused in all of the other cases (i.e., when any form of internal or external search or evaluation of the alternatives takes place, including any attempt to Wnd out which alternatives are available). We have just demonstrated why the experiments reported in previous studies did not provide clear support for the existence of the focusing eVect. Therefore, the Wrst goal of our experiments was to establish such an existence, by showing that it is also possible to obtain
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the eVect when the participants are expected to explicitly ask information both on the proposed option (henceforth, the focal option) and on the potential alternatives. This implies that the decision problem should be designed in such a way that the features of all the options are not well-known to the participants. Furthermore, even when more than one alternative is mentioned, the text of the problem should clearly point to a focal option. The second aim of our experiments was to identify those variables that help decision makers to defocus (i.e., to reduce the focusing eVect), in order to acquire speciWc indications on the determinants and the cognitive underpinnings of the focusing behavior. Assuming that both representational and value-related variables play a role in the onset of the eVect, we investigated their inXuence. 2. Experiment 1 In Experiment 1 we decided to study the focusing eVect in a scenario in which it is common to acquire information about the alternatives, where all of the options are fully comparable and their features are unknown to the participants, and where no wellknown default option is available. According to our previous analysis, these are the most appropriate conditions for appraising the robustness of the focusing eVect. The participants’ task was to choose a hotel to stay at during a brief business trip in an unknown city. The Wrst aim of the experiment was to see whether it was possible to obtain a focusing eVect also in this new scenario. Our second objective was to start investigating the conditions that may help the individual to defocus. Assuming that a partial mental representation is one of the causes for the diYculty in taking into account the potential alternatives to the focal option, we tried to promote defocusing by making these alternatives explicit. Two versions of the following scenario were presented to diVerent groups of participants (the enumeration condition includes the text in brackets, while the focus condition does not): A business engagement requires you to spend a week in a city that you have never been to before. You decide to contact Marco, an old schoolmate who has been living there for some years, to ask him for some information about hotels in the city. Marco suggests that you book hotel A [one of the four hotels available in the city (A, B, C, D)]. What information do you need to help you decide whether to book hotel A? Our hypothesis was that the explicit enumeration of the alternatives should help the participants to overcome the focusing eVect because it makes each speciWc option highly accessible. Therefore, we expected to Wnd a greater proportion of defocusing participants in the enumeration condition than in the focus condition. 2.1. Method Fifty-eight undergraduates from the University of Trieste (37 females and 21 males, between the ages of 19 and 31) were randomly assigned to either the focus group or the enumeration group, following a two-group between subjects design. After a brief written introduction, the participants received a one-page document. The version of the scenario corresponding to the experimental condition to which the participant had been assigned,
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Table 1 Number of participants who asked or did not ask questions related to alternatives to the focal option in the focus and enumeration conditions of Experiment 1 Condition
Asked
Did not ask
Focus Enumeration
5 14
24 15
was presented at the top of the page. Each participant was required to read the scenario and to write down all the questions needed to reach a decision.1 Two independent judges classiWed the participants’ questions in three predeWned categories: (a) questions referring to the focal option (hotel A), (b) questions about options diVerent from the focal one, and (c) other questions (not related to the options). The judges were instructed to classify any questions containing explicit or implicit references to alternative options in the second category (defocusing questions). Thus, the defocusing category comprised both the questions containing an explicit reference to other hotels (“Are there other hotels in the town?”, “Do I have any alternative to hotel A?”, “What is the price of the hotels?”) and the questions containing an indirect reference to diVerent hotels (“Is A the cheapest hotel in town?”). The judges were provided with written instructions, which included speciWc classiWcation examples for each of the scoring categories. These examples had been unanimously selected by the three authors of this paper from the answers to a pretest. The judges’ inter-rater agreement, computed via Cohen’s kappa, was greater than .80. 2.2. Results and discussion SigniWcant diVerences between the two conditions were found in the proportions of participants who asked at least one question about possible alternatives to the focal option (test on proportions p < .01, one-tailed), despite the absence of a signiWcant diVerence in the total number of questions asked (Mann–Whitney test, p D .49; enumeration: M D 5; focus: M D 4.66). The observed frequencies are presented in Table 1. As predicted, making the potential alternatives to the focal option explicit through enumeration allows for the focusing eVect to be reduced to a certain degree. In any case, the focusing behavior observed in this experiment is rather strong even when the alternatives are enumerated. The fact that 48% of participants in the enumeration condition are focused suggests that a partial representation is not the sole cause of this eVect; a deliberate limitation of the information acquisition may have also played a role.
1
In a control experiment, we replicated the basic focusing experiment (Legrenzi et al., 1993) and we also compared the results obtained using the original interview method with those obtained through a self-report procedure. The latter procedure required the participants to write down all the questions that they would have asked the experimenter in order to make a decision. This test was aimed at strengthening the evidence already provided by Cherubini et al. (2003), who replicated the basic eVect and obtained very similar results using an interview and a self-report procedure (no context condition in Experiment 1 vs. activity–not activity condition in Experiment 2). Our results conWrmed the Wndings of the previous studies. Detailed information on the experiment is available from the Wrst author.
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3. Experiment 2 In Experiments 2 and 3 we tested the hypothesis that indirect or generic references to the alternatives may not be a particularly eVective way to lead the participants to defocus. In Experiment 2, using a modiWed version of the hotel scenario, we hypothesized that the explicit enumeration of speciWc options is more likely to promote defocusing than an indirect reference (i.e., hotel A is presented but the participants are asked which hotel they want to book into). In Experiment 3, we tested a hypothesis related to the value of the focal option by adopting a marketing scenario, but we also checked whether a direct but generic reference to the alternatives is able to inXuence the focusing eVect (i.e., alternative opportunities are explicitly mentioned). Our predictions are grounded on research conducted on fault trees, which showed that decision makers are more sensitive to the potential options when these are explicitly speciWed and not grouped under a generic label. For instance, FischhoV, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1978) found that both naïve participants and experts are not very sensitive to the incompleteness of a fault tree representation. Their participants had to estimate the frequency distribution of the potential causes of a car failure using fault tree representations that diVered in their completeness. When some causes were not explicitly represented as single branches of the tree, but rather pooled in the “all other problems” branch, the participants provided lower estimates for these. Subsequent research (Dubé-Rioux & Russo, 1988; Russo & Kolzow, 1994) conWrmed that this kind of behavior can be partly ascribed to the reduced availability of the causes of failure that are pooled in the generic class of “all other problems.” Another purpose of Experiment 2 was to rule out the possibility that a particular feature of the scenario used in Experiment 1 might have had an unwanted inXuence on our results. In that scenario, the focal option was proposed by a friend, and this may have had an inXuence on the predecision information search. The friend is someone that probably knows the participants’ preferences and needs. Therefore, when the friend proposes a hotel, the participants may think that their friend has already evaluated a series of hotels and has selected the one which is best suited to their needs. Thus, assuming that the participants made such inferences, it would have been rational for them to ask for information on the focal option only, with the aim of consolidating an option (Svenson, 1992) already selected by someone else. In order to test the robustness of the results obtained in Experiment 1, we modiWed the scenario used in that experiment. The major change is that the hotel information was provided by a clearly neutral source (the operator of a local public tourist bureau) and not by a friend. Minor details were also modiWed in order to let the participant know that their basic needs were already satisWed by the options proposed by the operator, as well as to strengthen the plausibility of the scenario. Finally, in Experiment 2 we aimed to oVer a more detailed picture of the planned information acquisition, by taking into account not only the presence of (at least) one question about the alternatives to the focal option but the entire distribution of the questions, their content, and their sequence. Thus, we compared the questions collected in the diVerent focusing conditions on all of these dimensions. We also added to the design a baseline condition in which no focal option was highlighted, in order to exclude the possibility that information acquisition is selective even when the problem formulation does not point to a focal option.
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The four diVerent versions of the scenario used in Experiment 2 were as follows: A business engagement requires you to spend a week in a city that you have never been to before. You call the number of a local public tourist bureau to Wnd a hotel room and the operator, after having asked you the name of the city, the time period, and the category, starts to suggest [Focus condition] hotel A. What information would you ask to help you decide whether to book hotel A? [Question condition] hotel A. What information would you ask to help you decide which hotel to book? [Enumeration condition] hotels A, B, C, and D. What information would you ask to help you decide whether to book hotel A? [Baseline condition] hotels A, B, C, and D. What information would you ask to help you decide which hotel to book? Please write down all the questions you would ask the operator in order to help you to reach a decision. Write the questions in exactly the same form you would use when asking the operator. We adopted a 2 £ 2 between subject design, in which we varied the presence of the focal option both within the text of the story (hotel A vs. none) and in the Wnal question (hotel A vs. none). In the focus condition, only hotel A was mentioned in both the text of the story and in the Wnal question. In the question condition, hotel A was the only hotel mentioned in the text, but an indirect reference to other hotels was made in the Wnal question. In the enumeration condition, all of the alternatives were enumerated in the text, but the Wnal question referred only to hotel A. Finally, in the baseline condition, all four hotels were enumerated in the text and the Wnal question did not point to a speciWc option. We tested the following hypotheses: H1 (enumeration hypothesis): the participants will be more likely to ask questions about potential alternatives to the focal option if these are fully enumerated. H2 (enumeration eVectiveness hypothesis): the explicit enumeration of the alternatives will be more eVective in reducing the focusing eVect than the indirect reference contained in the Wnal question. H3 (focusing hypothesis): the participants in all the experimental conditions will carry out a more focused inquiry than the participants in the baseline condition (who will not focus on a single option). 3.1. Method One hundred and twenty undergraduates from the University of Trieste (34 males and 86 females, between the ages of 18 and 33) were randomly assigned to four groups. Each group received one version of the story, according to the design. Before collecting the data, we developed a coding scheme based on the analysis of the questions from Experiment 1. Following this scheme, each question was classiWed according to three dimensions: scope, content, and position. In all of the conditions except for the baseline, the questions were Wrst classiWed into those relating to the focal option vs. those concerning the alternatives to the focal option (scope). In the baseline condition, the questions were instead classiWed
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according to their target (i.e., hotel A, B, C, or D). The content classiWcation was based on four categories: cost (e.g., What is the cost of a room?), distance (e.g., How far is the hotel from the workplace?), services (e.g., Does the room contain a TV?), and general information on the hotel or on the surrounding area (e.g., Is there a metro stop near this hotel?). Finally, the position dimension referred to the position of the question in the sequence of requests speciWed by the participant. The inter-observer agreement between the two independent judges who scored the questions was greater than .80 (Cohen’s kappa) for the scope and content dimensions. The observers unanimously agreed on the scoring of the position dimension. 3.2. Results We found a signiWcant diVerence between the three experimental conditions regarding the number of participants who asked at least one question about the alternatives to the focal option (2(2) D 9.3, p < .01). The observed frequencies are presented in Table 2. The diVerence between pairs of conditions was assessed by tests on proportions. The proportion of participants who defocused was signiWcantly higher in the enumeration than in the focus condition (p < .01, one-tailed) and in the question condition (p < .05, onetailed). The Wrst diVerence was predicted by the enumeration hypothesis, and the second one by the enumeration eVectiveness hypothesis. Furthermore, the comparison between the focus and the question conditions did not yield signiWcant results (p D .14, one-tailed). A Wnal observation is that the majority of the participants in all the conditions other than the baseline did not ask questions about the alternatives to the focal option. A 2 £ 2 mixed ANOVA showed that participants in the three experimental conditions asked signiWcantly more questions about the focal option than about the alternatives (F(1, 87) D 329.14, MSE D 2.08, p < .0001). This same ANOVA did not yield a signiWcant main eVect of the experimental condition (F(2, 87) D 0.61, MSE D 1.02, p D .55) or of the interaction (F(2, 87) D 0.51, MSE D 2.08, p D .60). The participants in all the experimental groups were by and large focused (number of questions about the alternatives: focus, M D .10; enumeration, M D .30; question, M D .36), and they also asked a similar number of questions about the focal option (focus: M D 4.27; enumeration: M D 3.93; question: M D 4.26). It should be noted that the ANOVA failed to detect the signiWcant diVerences between the enumeration and the remaining conditions, which were instead clearly demonstrated by the analysis of frequencies and proportions. Approximately one-third of the participants in the enumeration condition asked one question regarding the alternatives. Thus, these participants proved capable of diverting their attention away from the focal option at some Table 2 Number of participants who asked or did not ask questions related to alternatives to the focal option in the focus, enumeration, and question conditions of Experiment 2 Condition
Asked
Did not ask
Focus Enumeration Question
1 9 3
29 21 27
Note: In the baseline condition, in which there is no focal option, all of the participants (n D 30) asked information about more than one option.
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point in time. This leads us to conclude that the presence of a single defocusing question is a more sensitive measure of defocusing behavior than the number of defocusing questions. The focusing behavior we observed in Experiment 2 was limited to the experimental conditions. In the baseline condition, a single participant did show some trace of selective information acquisition (in two questions out of four). The participants formulated all of the questions as simultaneous requests for information about the four options (e.g., What is the cost of a room in each hotel?). It is interesting to note that the defocusing questions in the experimental conditions presented a similar structure: multiple requests of information were grouped together. The baseline data provided strong support for the focusing hypothesis, given that the proportion of completely unselective participants in the baseline condition (.97) was much greater than the proportions of participants who proved capable of asking at least one question about the alternatives to the focal option in each of the experimental conditions (focus: .03, p < .0001; question: .10, p < .0001; enumeration: .30, p < .0001). We will now present an exploratory analysis of the content and the position of the questions. We performed this analysis in order to understand whether focusing inXuences not only the scope but also the content of the information acquisition. Moreover, we were interested in understanding whether the participants expose a defocusing behavior early in the sequence of questions or only after having asked a number of questions on the focal option. A 4 £ 4 mixed ANOVA on the number of the questions in each of the four content categories did not show any diVerence across the four conditions (F(3, 116) D 0.53, MSE D 0.55, p D .66). The interaction between the condition and the content of the question was not signiWcant either (F(9, 348) D 0.86, MSE D 0.78, p D .56), while the main eVect of the content of the question was signiWcant (F(3, 348) D 9.85, MSE D 0.78, p < .0001). These results make clear that there are no marked diVerences in the content of the questions across the four groups. In each condition, the participants asked on average one question about cost (M D 1.02), distance (M D 1.27), hotel services (M D 1.31), and slightly fewer general questions (M D .76). The diVerence between the number of general questions and the number of questions on distance and services was signiWcant (p < .0001 in both the cases; Tukey HSD test), while the diVerence between the number of global questions and the number of questions on cost was only marginally signiWcant (p D .09 ; Tukey HSD test). Further analyses of the data disaggregated by scope showed a similar pattern of results both for the focusing questions (in all the conditions except for the baseline) and the unselective questions (in the baseline condition). Finally, we considered the sequence of the questions. We took into account the participants who asked questions both on the focal option and the possible alternatives, because only these cases allow for a comparison of the relative position of the two types of questions. Eight out of eleven participants (73%) asked questions about the alternatives only at the end of the series of questions on the focal option. A comparison of the relative position of the questions, using the single question as the unit of analysis and a t-test with separate variance estimation, showed that the focusing questions occur signiWcantly earlier in the sequence than the defocusing ones (t(19) D ¡2.53, p < .05). 3.3. Discussion In Experiment 2, we replicated the results obtained in Experiment 1 and acquired a more detailed picture of the focusing eVect. First, we conWrmed that the focusing eVect is
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strong even when the potential options are fully comparable and when the context should trigger a natural comparison process. Given that the participants were told that the information was provided by a neutral source, the results of Experiment 2 cannot be explained by assuming that the inXuence of participants’ speciWc inferences was related to the source of information. Experiment 2 also showed that the content of the questions during focused information acquisition does not diVer from the content of the questions asked in a baseline condition, even if their structure is diVerent. Secondly, we showed again that the speciWc enumeration of the alternatives (a representational manipulation) increases the capacity to defocus. The defocusing questions tend to occur at the end of the sequence, only after a certain number of questions about the focal option have been asked. In agreement with our expectations, the manipulation of the Wnal question, containing only an indirect reference to the alternatives, proved ineVective in reducing the focusing eVect. The inXuence of our enumerative manipulation complements the evidence provided by Jones et al. (1998, Experiment 3). These researchers devised an opportunity condition where the participants were asked whether they would use a gift of $15 to buy “the latest CD of one of your favorite bands” or “do something else” with the same money. This condition was compared with a generate condition in which, before making the choice, the participants were also required to generate a list of “5–10 reasonable things that you could do besides buying the CD”. The “do something else” option was chosen more frequently in this last condition, and this was attributed to the fact that speciWc alternatives to the focal option were presumably more accessible in the generate condition than in the opportunity condition. Therefore, our results and Jones et al.’s Experiment 3 provide converging support for the eVectiveness of representational manipulations in reducing the focusing eVect, despite the diVerences between manipulation types (enumeration of given alternatives vs. self-generation of alternatives), scenarios (book a hotel vs. buy something with a gift of $15), and dependent variables (questions vs. choices). Due to the fact that we avoided asking participants to generate alternatives, our results strengthen Jones et al.’s explanation of their data. On the other hand, Jones et al. provided preliminary evidence showing that the representation of the decision problem may also aVect the Wnal choice. Finally, the focusing behavior observed in Experiment 2 is rather strong even when the alternatives are fully enumerated. As in Experiment 1, a deliberate limitation of the information acquisition may have also occurred. 4. Experiment 3 Experiment 3 was introduced to establish whether the value of the focal option is able to increase the decision maker’s capacity to defocus. According to the relevance account, the higher the expected utility of the potential alternatives relative to the focal option is, the higher the probability is that the decision maker will acquire information about these alternatives, because the possible beneWts of the information acquisition are high. The context condition of the Legrenzi et al.’s study (1993) also suggests the idea that the decision maker is willing to explore alternatives to the focal option when their relative value is high. A satisWcing view of information acquisition would instead rely on the quality of the focal option: The participant will remain focused on the given option if it is deemed as satisfying. Conversely, if the focal option is not satisfying, the participant will be more willing to consider the alternatives.
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We designed a risky decision problem in which the focal option was an ad campaign for a product. The participants’ task was to decide whether or not to adopt this campaign. The information provided concerned the outcomes of similar advertising programs carried out in the past. Three variables were manipulated: (a) the revenue of the past outcomes (10% vs. 90% of the expected proWt), (b) the extent of information provided about the past outcomes (10% vs. 90% of cases), and (c) a Wnal sentence making a direct but generic reference to potential alternatives (present vs. absent). The text of the problem used in Experiment 3 was as follows (the distinctive parts of each version are in brackets): You are the manager of the advertising division of a big company. The company has to promote product X, from whose sales signiWcant proWts are expected. In [10–90%] of the cases an advertising campaign of type Y for products similar to X led the company to realize [10–90%] of the expected proWts. You have to decide whether to adopt a campaign of type Y to promote X [or to evaluate alternative opportunities]. We hypothesized that the decision maker is more likely to ask information about the alternatives when the focal option has a lower value. Therefore, we manipulated the revenue of the past outcomes, which is the only information provided in the problem scenario that can be used to assess the value of the focal option. The extent of the information provided about the past outcomes was also varied in order to construct two types of decision scenarios diVering in the completeness of the information provided. We predicted that the less partial the information provided appears to be, the more focused the decision maker will be. Given that the procedure adopted in this experiment allowed the participants either to make an immediate decision or to ask for more information, we expected that when the initial extent of information is greater, the decision maker will be more likely to decide immediately, relying solely on the value of the focal option (i.e., to immediately accept or reject that option). Finally, the last independent variable was the availability of a generic reference to the alternatives: The experiment comprised a set of conditions in which the possible existence of alternatives to the focal option was explicitly mentioned. This variable was included in the design in order to check the robustness of the eVects eventually produced by the value and extent manipulations. Furthermore, we wanted to explore the eVectiveness of a direct but generic reference to the alternatives on the participants’ capacity to defocus. We put forward the following hypotheses: H1a (focal reject hypothesis): when the extent of information is greater (90%) and the past revenue is lower (10%), the decision maker is more likely to reject the option without asking for more information. H1b (focal acceptance hypothesis): when both the extent of information and the past revenue are greater (90%), the decision maker is more willing to accept the option without asking for more information. H2 (value hypothesis): when the past revenue is lower (10%), the decision maker is more likely to ask information about the alternatives to the focal option. 4.1. Method Three independent variables (revenue, extent of information, and Wnal sentence) were manipulated in a 2 £ 2 £ 2 factorial design. One hundred and eighty-three undergraduates from the University of Trieste (110 females and 73 males, between the ages of 19 and 27)
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Table 3 Number of participants who stated that the information was insuYcient to decide (insuYcient), accepted the focal option (accepted), or did not accept the focal option (rejected) in Experiment 3 Extent (%)
Revenue (%)
Final reference
InsuYcient
Accepted
Rejected
90 90 90 90 10 10 10 10
90 90 10 10 90 90 10 10
Absent Present Absent Present Absent Present Absent Present
18 10 13 7 10 10 12 7
9 5 2 1 3 1 1 2
5 7 16 13 6 8 7 10
were randomly assigned to eight groups. Each group was composed of a number of participants ranging from 19 to 32.2 The procedure was the same as in the previous experiments. The only diVerence, motivated by our desire to strengthen the decision component of the task, was that the participants also had the possibility of making an immediate choice. After having read the text describing the decision scenario, the participants were Wrst asked to choose one of the following options: (a) I adopt the campaign, (b) I do not adopt the campaign, or (c) I do not have suYcient information to decide. Only if the participants stated that there was not suYcient information to make a decision, were they then instructed to read a separate page of the questionnaire. On this page the participants were told to imagine that all the information required to make a decision could be provided by an expert consultant, and to write down all the questions they would like to ask this consultant. The questions were classiWed according to the same procedure already used in Experiment 1, and the interrater agreement was very good (Cohen’s kappa greater than .80). 4.2. Results and discussion More than half of the participants (52%) did not ask for additional information (39% of them immediately rejected the proposal and 13% accepted it). The analysis of frequency data (Table 3) allowed testing H1a and H1b. The participants were more likely to immediately reject the focal option when the past revenue was lower and the extent of information was greater, as predicted by the focal reject hypothesis and conWrmed by a test on proportions (p < .01, one-tailed, .56 vs. .33). Therefore, it seems that the focal option was refused especially in the conditions in which it appeared more unattractive: when the extent of the information provided was greater and the past value of the focal option was lower. When both the past revenue and the extent of information were greater, there was a signiWcant increase in the frequency of participants who immediately accepted the focal option, as predicted by the focal acceptance hypothesis
2 The diVerences in the sample sizes of the experimental conditions were due to the fact that the data was collected during the class meetings of diVerent courses. The participants in each meeting were randomly preassigned to the experimental conditions according to the lists of students for each course but, unfortunately, the number of actual participants varied. In any case, the adoption of this procedure ensures that the actual composition of the groups is not aVected by any systematic selection bias.
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Table 4 Number of participants who asked or did not ask questions related to alternatives to the focal option in the 10% revenue and 90% revenue conditions of Experiment 3 Condition
Asked
Did not ask
90% Revenue 10% Revenue
12 20
36 19
and supported by a test on proportions (p < .001, one-tailed, .35 vs. .10 after the removal of the cases related to the focal reject hypothesis). In order to test the value hypothesis, we restricted our analysis to those participants who did not make an immediate decision but asked for additional information. A 2 £ 2 £ 2 ANOVA on the number of questions asked by each participant about the alternatives showed that the only factor able to induce a defocusing behavior was the past revenue of the focal option (F(1, 79) D 7.23, MSE D 0.44, p < .01; lower revenue: M D .69, higher revenue: M D .29). Thus, even if the total number of questions was not signiWcantly diVerent in the two revenue conditions (Mann–Whitney test, p D .79; high revenue: M D 3.04, low revenue: M D 2.9), the number of defocusing questions was slightly (but signiWcantly) higher if the focal option had a lower past revenue. Moreover, the proportion of participants who asked at least one question about the alternatives to the focal option was greater in the lower revenue than in the greater revenue condition (p < .01, one-tailed; the observed frequencies are reported in Table 4). Finally, the results seem to be robust. The presence in the text of the problem regarding generic reference to the potential alternatives to the focal option did not have signiWcant eVects on the number of questions asked by each participant about the alternatives (F(1, 79) D 1.06, MSE D .44, p D .31) or on the proportion of participants who asked at least one question about the alternatives to the focal option (p D .13, one-tailed). However, our limited sample size suggests a cautious interpretation of these results. The results of Experiment 3 supported all the hypotheses. The participants are inXuenced by a value-related variable (past revenue) and by the extent of information in their immediate decision to ask for more information about the ad program. When the participants ask for more information, the past revenue of the focal option is able to signiWcantly reduce the focusing eVect, which is overall rather strong (63% of the participants did not ask any questions on the potential alternatives). 5. General discussion In three experiments involving two diVerent decision scenarios we observed signiWcant focusing eVects. Focusing appears to be a robust phenomenon and we were able to reduce it only by applying strong manipulations (by enumerating the alternatives to the focal option and lowering the value of the focal option). It is important to note that none of the existing theoretical explanations of the focusing eVect is capable of providing a natural and integrated account for the complete pattern of our results. While the mental model theory predicts the impact of the representational manipulations, and the satisWcing and relevance hypotheses are in compliance with the Wndings produced by the value-related manipulation, each view needs to be both broadened and speciWed in order to encompass the entire set of results.
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A comprehensive account should explain how value-related and representational variables aVect the cognitive processes underlying information acquisition, specifying the basic cognitive processes responsible for the focusing eVect. Moreover, such an account should consider two diVerent kinds of focusing eVect. In order to set the stage for integrative research eVorts, we will discuss our Wndings in the light of existing models of option generation and information acquisition. We propose a distinction between two kinds of focusing eVect, stemming from diVerent processes: the representational focusing eVect and the search-related focusing eVect. When the decision maker’s mental representation does not contain references to alternatives to the focal option, we are observing a representational focusing eVect: The decision maker does not take into account potential alternatives because these are simply not included in the representation. The eVectiveness of the representational manipulations in our experiments and in previous studies (cf. Jones et al., 1998) provides support for this type of focusing.3 We hypothesize that this kind of focusing may stem from the representational myopia of the individual (Legrenzi et al., 1993) that, in some cases, limits the information search. This initial focus on a given option may also make the subsequent retrieval of information about known alternatives more diYcult (cf. Sanbonmatsu, Posavac, Kardes, & Mantel, 1998), due to the inXuence of inhibitory processes similar to those involved in part-list cueing (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994; Roediger, 1973). Alternatives to the focal option may be noticed by the decision maker due to their high accessibility, or as the result of a serial option generation process (Gettys, Pliske, Manning, & Casey, 1987; Klein, Wolf, Militello, & Zsambok, 1995), which is more likely to be triggered when the focal option is not satisfying (or its relative utility is low) and to be successful when the accessibility of alternative options is high. The accessibility of the alternatives can be boosted by the context or by retrieval cues. Several studies in reasoning (Legrenzi et al., 1993), problem solving (Duncker, 1926, 1945; Lovett & Schunn, 1999; Ohlsson, 1992), and decision making (FischhoV et al., 1978; Gettys et al., 1987; Klein et al., 1995) indicate that individuals may rely on incomplete or partial representations which, in many cases, ensure a satisfying solution but, in some cases, can lead the individuals to experience impasses or to become prone to reasoning and decision biases. DiVerent kinds of variables (for instance, contextual or environmental cues) can help in Wnding a more appropriate representation. When the decision maker’s mental representation contains at least one speciWc reference to the alternatives, but no internal or external search or evaluation of these alternatives is carried out, we are observing a search-related focusing eVect: The decision maker is deliberately ignoring options that are explicitly represented. The rather strong focusing eVect that we observed in our experiments even when the alternatives to the focal options were explicitly enumerated seems to be in compliance with search-related focusing. Research on decision strategies has shown that information acquisition may be selective even when the information display explicitly presents all the available alternatives in a matrix or in a list
3 Indirect support for the representational type of focusing may come from the eVectiveness of similar manipulations in other decision making studies on selective consideration. The brand positivity eVect is reduced when the participants are prompted to consider alternative options while the focal option is initially rated (Posavac, Sanbonmatsu, Kardes, & Fitzsimons, 2004). The durability bias can be reduced when the participants consider future events that are likely to occupy their thoughts (Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom, 2000). These converging results may suggest that representational focusing is a general phenomenon, which can generally be reduced by increasing the accessibility of alternative options.
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(Bettman, Payne, & Luce, 1998). Furthermore, this kind of selectivity may help the individual to make a good choice with a limited investment in cognitive eVort (Bettman et al., 1998; Payne et al., 1993). Selectivity may be an eVective response to the information overload and to the absence of external memories, at least in decision environments where the inter-attribute correlation is positive or where the attributes do not have the same subjective importance (i.e., the distribution of decision weights is not uniform: Fasolo, McClelland, & Todd, in press). In the majority of decision environments, the most advantageous form of selectivity is the adoption of decision heuristics that are selective on the attributes. Nonetheless, a decision strategy that is selective on the alternatives, like the satisWcing heuristic, may also help the decision maker to Wnd an appropriate solution with a limited investment in cognitive eVort (Schwartz et al., 2002; Simon, 1956). Other evidence supporting the distinction between the representational and the searchrelated types of focusing (and of the diVerent cognitive mechanisms associated with these) comes from research on the consideration set (Roberts & Lattin, 1991, 1997). Consumers apply selective screening process in order to narrow down the initial pool of options to a manageable number. Research in this area has shown that diVerent variables may aVect the screening processes, but here it is important to underline that there is evidence supporting both the role of the memory accessibility of the alternatives (Nedungadi, 1990) and the selectivity of the information search processes among explicitly represented options (Bettman, 1979). Furthermore, this research suggests that both types of focusing eVect may play a signiWcant role during the course of the same choice task. 5.1. Other eVects related to selective attention or consideration Decision researchers described various phenomena related to selective attention or consideration. We will present a brief review of the more signiWcant ones, discussing their relationship with the focusing eVect. In hypothesis testing experiments, the participant is typically asked to judge the likelihood of a hypothesis from the information acquired or provided by the experimenter. Individuals tend to focus on one hypothesis at a time and to seek positive/conWrming evidence. At the same time, they tend to neglect other possibilities (cf. Klayman, 1995; Klayman & Ha, 1987). Despite the basic similarity between the focusing eVect and selective hypothesis testing, evaluating an option according to preference criteria seems to entail processes and dimensions (e.g., valuation) that are partially diVerent than those involved in appraising the likelihood of a hypothesis by means of inferential reasoning. Another series of experiments led to the discovery of the selective consideration eVect (Posavac, Sanbonmatsu, & Ho, 2002) and of the brand positivity eVect (Posavac et al., 2004). In these experiments, some of the participants are initially asked to evaluate a given option in isolation, and the option receives an overly positive assessment. In a subsequent choice task, these participants exhibit a higher probability of selecting this very option. According to Posavac et al. (2002), selective consideration could cause the extremity of consumers’ attitudes toward a focal brand to become more positive. Posavac et al. (2004) stated that selective processing of brand information underlies the brand positivity eVect. These studies are relevant because they show that selective consideration may enhance the positive evaluation of the focal option, and this may contribute to the focusing eVect. Finally, a number of studies have investigated diVerent forms of focusing behavior by adopting diverse research paradigms. It is diYcult to say if a common explanation can
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account for all their results. Dhar and Simonson (1992) found that the choice probability of an alternative can be enhanced by making it the focus of comparison, especially when the features of the alternatives need to be retrieved from memory. Schkade and Kahneman (1998) made reference to a focusing illusion to explain the Wnding that Californians report to be less satisWed with their lives than Midwesterners would expect. This focusing illusion appears to lead Midwesterners to place more importance on perceived diVerences in climate or cultural opportunities when making judgments. Wilson et al. (2000) observed that people overestimate the duration of their emotional response to future events and attributed this durability bias to focalism: The individual focuses too much on the target event and not enough on the consequences of other future events. Finally, Tor and Bazerman (2003) and Idson et al. (2004) explained prominent biases in negotiation and competitive decision making by referring to focusing failures. In our opinion, it is likely that the cognitive and evaluative mechanisms underlying selective hypothesis testing, the brand positivity eVect, focalism, and the other diVerent expressions of focusing behavior are partially similar (cf. Legrenzi et al., 1993; Sanbonmatsu et al., 1998). However, due to nonnegligible procedural diVerences between the existing studies, the common nature of the underlying processes should be regarded more as a likely possibility than as a certainty. 5.2. Limitations, directions for future research, and conclusion The experiments presented in this paper have contributed to a better understanding of the focusing eVect. Nonetheless, we wish to take into account their possible limitations and show how these can be overcome by natural extensions of the research. The Wrst limitation concerns the adoption of a noninteractive paper and pencil procedure in which the participants were asked to report their planned behavior. Even if there is experimental evidence that this procedure is as sensitive to the focusing eVect as an interactive one1, it would be interesting to examine how the information search behavior is dynamically aVected by the information received. A second limitation relates to the absence of a real decision. We were able to obtain evidence showing the inXuence of focusing on information search behavior, and other researchers provided indications that focusing may aVect the Wnal choice (Jones et al., 1998, Experiment 3). Nonetheless, these results would be strengthened by new experiments in which both the information acquisition and the Wnal choice are traced and analyzed. Finally, we cannot make deWnitive claims on the speciWc nature of the focusing eVect (representational or search-related) that we observed in some of our experiments. This is due to the fact that our inferences rely exclusively on the eVects produced by the manipulation of the decision scenario and on the analysis of the “overt” requests for information. Therefore, as Tyszka (1986) did in open decision situations, it would also be useful to carry out verbal protocol studies. Despite these limitations, our experiments clearly showed that strong forms of focusing take place in predecisional information acquisition. The empirical evidence suggests that both representational factors and the value of the focal option play an important role in this phenomenon. Moreover, our theoretical analysis and review showed that the focusing eVect can be produced by at least two diVerent processes, related to a partial representation of the decision problem or to a deliberate limitation of information search. We hope that
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