How do people translate their experiences into abstract attribute preferences?

Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85Author(s): Paul W. Eastwick, Leigh K. Smith, Alison LedgerwoodAbstractIn many literatures, scholars study summarized attribute preferences: overall evaluative summaries of an attribute (e.g., a person's liking for the attribute “attractive” in a mate). But we know little about how people form these ideas about their likes and dislikes in the first place, in part because of a dearth of paradigms that enable researchers to experimentally change people's attribute preferences. Drawing on theory and methods in covariation detection and social cognition, we developed a paradigm that examines how people infer summarized preferences for novel attributes from functional attribute preferences: the extent to which the attribute predicts an individual's evaluations across multiple targets (e.g., a person's tendency to positively evaluate mates who are more vs. less attractive). In three studies, participants encountered manipulated information about their own functional preference for a novel attribute in a set of targets. They then inferred a summarized preference for the attribute. Summarized preferences corresponded strongly to the functional preference manipulation when targets varied on only one attribute. But additional complexity (in the form of a second novel attribute) caused summarized and functional preferences to diverge, and biases emerged: Participants reported stronger summarize...

Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 26, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research