Considering the best choice: effects of the salience and accessibility of alternatives on attitude--decision consistency

Abstract

The authors examined how the presence or absence of specified alternatives influences which alternatives are considered and what choice is made. The accessibility of alternatives as a moderator of the correspondence between attitudes and decisions also was investigated. In Study 1, the accessibility of alternatives was an important determinant of choice when decisions options were unspecified. The results of Studies 2 and 3 suggest that the potential for attitude-decision correspondence is high when (a) the decision context makes the alternatives salient or (b) alternatives are easily accessed from memory.