Using Context Effects to Influence Choice

AbstractPrevious research has demonstrated that people's preferences for an alternative can be reliably influenced by the other alternatives with which it is considered. This article examines the role of context effects in interactive decision making. Three studies examine people's intuitive abilities to influence others by leveraging context effects and their reactions when they believe others are manipulating the choice context to influence them. Experimental results show that people use context effects systematically when trying to influence others and, that under certain conditions, the perception of influence may enhance rather than decrease the effectiveness of this persuasion tactic.Originally published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 29, (March 2003)Full ReportClick here to download the full report in Adobe Acrobat format.About the AuthorRebecca W. Hamilton is assistant professor of marketing, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (e-mail: rhamilto@rhsmith.umd.edu). The author thanks Gabriel Biehal, Sally Blount, John Carroll, Aimee Drolet, Rick Larrick, Drazen Prelec, Nader Tavassoli, Debora Viana, and the JCR editors and reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts. The author is also grateful to seminar participants at MIT, the University of Maryland, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making annual meeting (New Orleans, November 2000), and the Association for Consumer Research Conference (Salt Lake City, October 2000) for valuable discussions and comments. Summary of ResultsThe results of study 1 suggest that people may understand how contextual factors influence others' choices and that they may use this knowledge to create menus that influence others' choices. Because people use the same persuasion knowledge as they move between the roles of persuasion agent and persuasion target (Friestad and Wright 1994), they should apply the same persuasion knowledge to detecting potential biases in the menus they receive.Study 2 provides further evidence that people may understand how to influence others' choices by constructing menus, replicating study 1 and supporting hypotheses 1a and 1b. In addition, this study examined reactions of people choosing from menus to the perception that people had constructed the menus to influence their choices. Subjects were quite willing to choose as they believed their friends wanted them to choose and, in fact, evaluated the same targets more favorably when they believed their friend had chosen the target and was trying to influence their choices than when they did not believe their friend was trying to influence their choices. This suggests that beliefs about the influence strategies used by others may affect satisfaction with choices as well as choices. There are some potential limitations to these results. Conditions might be particularly favorable for persuasion when the menu creator and chooser are friends, because persuasive attempts are more successful when people like the persuader and perceive the persuader to be similar to themselves (Petty and Wegener 1998). In the context of a group choice such as this one, choosers' perceptions that they had the same interests as the menu creator also may have made them more likely to comply with rather than resist the persuasion attempt. Support for hypothesis 3 was mixed. As predicted, subjects were marginally more willing to choose the dominant alternative from an attraction effect menu when they believed the menu had been created by a friend rather than a stranger. However, contrary to hypothesis 3, when subjects received compromise menus, they were more willing to choose the middle alternative when they believed the menus had been created by a stranger, and they were more willing to choose as they believed they were expected to choose in the ulterior motive condition. These differences across menu types are particularly interesting because the attraction effect and compromise effect differ in their perceived aggressiveness. Because the attraction effect constrains the chooser more, it is a more aggressive influence tactic (Barry and Shapiro 1992). Clearly, as in study 2, the local characteristics of the menus influenced subjects' choices even when they were aware that others were trying to influence them. Across all conditions, subjects were significantly more likely to choose the dominant alternative than another undominated alternative from attraction effect menus. Similarly, subjects were uniformly more likely to choose the middle alternative than the two more extreme alternatives from compromise menus. Study 3 demonstrates that even when subjects should have been motivated to resist a persuasion attemptwhen they believed the menu had been created by a stranger with an ulterior motivethey continued to be influenced by the local characteristics of the menus.

Using Context Effects to Influence Choice

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