Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA, USA ; Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa University Tokyo, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2013 Feb 7;4:41. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00041. eCollection 2013.
Choices not only reflect our preference, but they also affect our behavior. The phenomenon of choice-induced preference change has been of interest to cognitive dissonance researchers in social psychology, and more recently, it has attracted the attention of researchers in economics and neuroscience. Preference modulation after the mere act of making a choice has been repeatedly demonstrated over the last 50 years by an experimental paradigm called the "free-choice paradigm." However, Chen and Risen (2010) pointed out a serious methodological flaw in this paradigm, arguing that evidence for choice-induced preference change is still insufficient. Despite the flaw, studies using the traditional free-choice paradigm continue to be published without addressing the criticism. Here, aiming to draw more attention to this issue, we briefly explain the methodological problem, and then describe simple simulation studies that illustrate how the free-choice paradigm produces a systematic pattern of preference change consistent with cognitive dissonance, even without any change in true preference. Our stimulation also shows how a different level of noise in each phase of the free-choice paradigm independently contributes to the magnitude of artificial preference change. Furthermore, we review ways of addressing the critique and provide a meta-analysis to show the effect size of choice-induced preference change after addressing the critique. Finally, we review and discuss, based on the results of the stimulation studies, how the criticism affects our interpretation of past findings generated from the free-choice paradigm. We conclude that the use of the conventional free-choice paradigm should be avoided in future research and the validity of past findings from studies using this paradigm should be empirically re-established.
选择不仅反映了我们的偏好，还会影响我们的行为。选择诱发偏好变化的现象一直是社会心理学认知失调研究者感兴趣的话题，最近也引起了经济学和神经科学研究者的关注。通过一种被称为“自由选择范式”的实验范式，在过去的 50 年中，人们已经反复证明了仅仅通过做出选择这一行为就可以改变偏好。然而，Chen 和 Risen（2010）指出了该范式存在一个严重的方法学缺陷，他们认为选择诱发偏好变化的证据仍然不足。尽管存在缺陷，但使用传统自由选择范式的研究仍在继续发表，而没有解决这些批评。在这里，我们旨在引起更多人对这个问题的关注，简要解释这个方法学问题，然后描述简单的模拟研究，这些研究说明了自由选择范式是如何产生与认知失调一致的系统偏好变化模式的，即使没有真正偏好的变化。我们的模拟还展示了自由选择范式的每个阶段中不同水平的噪声如何独立地导致人为偏好变化的幅度。此外，我们回顾了应对批评的方法，并进行了元分析，以显示在解决批评后选择诱发偏好变化的效应大小。最后，我们根据模拟研究的结果，回顾和讨论了批评对我们从自由选择范式得出的过去发现的解释的影响。我们的结论是，未来的研究应避免使用传统的自由选择范式，应通过实证方法重新确立使用该范式的研究的过去发现的有效性。
