Value is Shaped by Unsatisfied Desire: Activating Frustrated Values From Past Tradeoffs Dynamically Shifts Unrelated Decisions

Traditional (e.g., microeconomic) views have presumed that the values or utilities people attach to various entities are fixed. From this perspective, making a good decision requires a valid process for eliciting what those values are, which may be thought of as equivalent to “looking up” fixed subjective utility measures in a registry. More recent behavioral decision research has largely displaced that presumption with one maintaining that valuation is a labile process. In particular, studies have indicated that decision makers’ value assessments depend on a host of conditions that happen to be present at the time of elicitation (e.g., framing and the nature of the required decision; Fischhoff, Slovic and Lichtenstein 1980; Hsee 1996; Slovic 1995). The resulting consensus has been that values are constructed on the spot, per existing conditions and demands. The present research proposes that the valuation process is a dynamic one that extends beyond the incidental circumstances surrounding a given decision situation. The proposition we examine is that among the significant contributors to the values that drive people’s decisions are also particulars of their recollections of prior decisions. Many real-life decision problems require the decision maker to make tradeoffs. Thus, choosing Laptop A and therefore enjoying its superior RAM would necessitate the pain of paying more than Laptop B’s lower price. The specific hypothesis we examined is that recalling a prior tradeoff situation can reliably remind decision makers that one side of that tradeoff entailed the satisfaction of one value (e.g., for high processing speed), but the frustration of another value (e.g., for saving money). Further, and critically, such recall is predicted to activate the frustrated values from their dormant states, thereby affecting decisions in current contexts that are irrelevant to the original tradeoff situations.