ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
A map of decoy influence in human multialternative choice.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 73 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural similarity between choice options predicts group-level context effects.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neuronal Activity in Orbitofrontal Cortex during Trinary Choices under Risk.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Is the Whole the Sum of its Parts? Neural Computation of Consumer Bundle Valuation in Humans.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The role of attention in multi attribute decision making.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neuronal Activity in Orbitofrontal Cortex during Trinary Choices under Risk.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- How decoy options ferment choice biases in real-world consumer decision-making.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Early versus late noise differentially enhances or degrades context-dependent choice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The timescale and direction of influence of a third inferior alternative in human value-learning.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Influence of Visual Coding Based on Attraction Effect on Human-Computer Interface.Journal of eye movement research · 2025Article
- The attraction effect in perceptual decision-making: a case of dominance asymmetry.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Matching provides efficient decisions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A robust Bayesian test for identifying context effects in multiattribute decision-making.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Context-effect bias in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.): exploring decoy influences in a value-based food choice task.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Intraparietal stimulation disrupts negative distractor effects in human multi-alternative decision-making.eLife · 2023Article
- Article
- Context-dependent choice and evaluation in real-world consumer behavior.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- How do (perceptual) distracters distract?PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Review
- Decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics: Recent progress and ongoing challenges.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human decisions can be biased by irrelevant information. For example, choices between two preferred alternatives can be swayed by a third option that is inferior or unavailable. Previous work has identified three classic biases, known as the attraction, similarity, and compromise effects, which arise during choices between economic alternatives defined by two attributes. However, the reliability, interrelationship, and computational origin of these three biases have been controversial. Here, a large cohort of human participants made incentive-compatible choices among assets that varied in price and quality. Instead of focusing on the three classic effects, we sampled decoy stimuli exhaustively across bidimensional multiattribute space and constructed a full map of decoy influence on choices between two otherwise preferred target items. Our analysis reveals that the decoy influence map is highly structured even beyond the three classic biases. We identify a very simple model that can fully reproduce the decoy influence map and capture its variability in individual participants. This model reveals that the three decoy effects are not distinct phenomena but are all special cases of a more general principle, by which attribute values are repulsed away from the context provided by rival options. The model helps us understand why the biases are typically correlated across participants and allows us to validate a prediction about their interrelationship. This work helps to clarify the origin of three of the most widely studied biases in human decision-making.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.