Spreading of Alternatives Without a Perception of Choice

Choosing a product changes a consumer’s attitudes toward it. Brehm (1956) classically demonstrated this by asking consumers to first rate several products, and then choose between two they had rated about equally. He found that attitudes toward chosen products improved and rejected products declined upon subsequent measurement. He explained this “post-choice spreading of alternatives” (Brehm, 1956) by cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Specifically, the negative features of the chosen option became inconsistent with the knowledge of having chosen them. The resulting unpleasant feeling of dissonance motivated choosers to downplay the importance of those features, allowing them to be happier with their choice (Simon, Greenberg, & Brehm, 1995). Researchers took Brehm’s “free-choice paradigm” (1956) as evidence that choosing causally changes attitudes (Festinger, 1957, 1964). Recently however, Chen and Risen (2010) argued that the paradigm contains a methodological flaw. To demonstrate that choice causally affects attitudes, they argued that one would need to ensure the choice outcome could not be driven by existing preference (2010; Risen & Chen, 2010). In response, several researchers demonstrated post-choice spreading while randomly assigning outcomes rather than allowing participants to make actual choices (Egan, Bloom, & Santos, 2010; Johansson, Hall, Tarning, Sikstrom, & Chater, 2014; Sharot, Velasquez, & Dolan, 2010). For example, Sharot et al. asked participants to make a choice based on information ostensibly presented subliminally. The “choice” outcome was actually randomly assigned. When participants believed they had made a choice, their attitudes toward chosen options improved, but when they believed a computer had chosen, there was no change in attitude (Sharot et al., 2010). The authors concluded that a “sense of agency” was critical to observing spreading. Similarly, following a procedure involving altering choices by sleight of hand, others have concluded that “it is not the choice per se that drives the preference change but rather the belief that a certain choice has been made” (Johansson et al., 2014, p. 288). These authors interpreted their results as consistent with self-perception theory (Bem, 1972), where people infer their own preferences from the choices they have made.