The Positive Consequences of Conflict: When a Conflict Mindset Facilitates Choice

Conflict is generally thought of as aversive, associated with depression, neuroticism and illness (Emmons & King, 1988), decreased task performance (Shah & Kruglanski, 2002), and impaired decision making. In contrast to this modal and intuitive view, we propose that conflict can also be beneficial. We test our proposal by examining the effects of incidental conflict on people’s willingness to make a decision. Extensive research on decision-making suggests that integral choice conflict increases deferral (Anderson, 2003; Iyengar & Lepper, 2000; Luce, 1998). In contrast we argue that incidental exposure to conflict activates a mindset that in turn facilitates decision making and increases choice likelihood. A conflict mindset brings with it the procedural benefits of coping with conflict without the associated costs such as negative affect (Luce, Bettman & Payne, 1999) or stress (Lazarus, 1993). In the current paper we activate conflict outside of awareness by priming conflicting goals, and look for increased choice in domains unrelated to the primed conflict. Our main proposition is that exposure to conflict activates a conflict mindset, which leads to more systematic processing of subsequent, difficult choices. This assumption is in line with prior research indicating people who proactively work to resolve choice conflict systematically consider more available information (Janis & Mann, 1977) and take longer to decide (Bettman, Johnson, Luce & Payne, 1993). We propose that as a result of this systematic processing of choice information, people in a conflict mindset are more likely to resolve conflict and make choices. This is consistent with the notion that people choose more often when preference uncertainty is reduced (Dhar and Simonson 2003). Four experiments test our propositions.