The Intentional Selection Assumption

Abstract

There exists a rich literature describing how social context influences decision making. Here, we propose a novel framing of social influences, the Intentional Selection Assumption. This framework proposes that, when a person is presented with a set of options by another social agent, people may treat the set of options as intentionally selected, reflecting the chooser's inferences about the presenter and the presenter's goals. To describe our proposal, we draw analogies to the cognition literature on sampling inferences within concept learning. This is done to highlight how the Intentional Selection Assumption accounts for both normative (e.g., comparing perceived utilities) and subjective (e.g., consideration of context relevance) principles in decision making, while also highlighting how analogous findings in the concept learning literature can aid in bridging these principles by drawing attention to the importance of potential sampling assumptions within decision making paradigms. We present the two behavioral experiments that provide support to this proposal and find that social-contextual cues influence choice behavior with respect to the induction of sampling assumptions. We then discuss a theoretical framework of the Intentional Selection Assumption alongside the possibility of its potential relationships to contemporary models of choice. Overall, our results emphasize the flexibility of decision makers with respect to social-contextual factors without sacrificing systematicity regarding the preference for specific options with a higher value or utility.

Keywords: context; decision making; intentional selection; social; social cognition.

Figure 1

Task manipulation performed in Experiments 1 and 2. Here, participants completed an online survey similar to a past work on the relativity of available choices (see Ariely, 2010). In all conditions, participants are presented with multiple options for purchasing a newspaper subscription: access to an online-only version, access to a joint online-and-print version, and (within the Intentional and Random conditions, only) a print-only version. Importantly, the presentation of these options varied across conditions in regard to the print-only version—with a purposeful inclusion in the Intentional condition, an unintentional inclusion in the Accidental condition, and an exclusion from the Control condition. Between experiments, the price of the online-only subscription was changed. In Experiment 1, $XX = $59. In Experiment 2, $XX = 99.

Figure 2

Forced choice results obtained from Experiment 1. Participants were more likely to choose the joint print and online subscription option in the Intentional condition compared to Accidental and Control conditions, χ² (4, n = 106) = 9.56, p = 0.048.

Figure 3

Forced choice results obtained from Experiment 2. Participants were more likely to choose the print and online subscription option and less likely to choose the online subscription option in the Intentional condition compared to Accidental and Control conditions, χ² (4, n = 97) = 10.20, p = 0.037.

Figure 4

Participants' ratings of feature importance from Experiment 2. Error bars represent the SE per choice, within the condition. Each individual dot represents an individual participant's rating as per the respective column, with links between their ratings of the two access types—online and print. Here, participants rated the availability of “online access” similarly across conditions, F_{(2, 94)} = 1.09, p = 0.341, and η² = 0.023. However, participants rated the availability of “print access” significantly higher in the Intentional condition, F_{(2, 94)} = 3.99, p = 0.022, and η² = 0.078.