Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University, 207 High St, Middletown, CT, 06459, USA.
Rutgers University-Newark, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Jun;25(3):1178-1183. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1326-4.
The partitioning of options into arbitrary categories has been shown to influence decisions about allocating choices or resources among those options; this phenomenon is called partition dependence. While we do not call into question the validity of the partition dependence phenomenon in the present work, we do examine the robustness of one of the experimental paradigms reported by Fox, Ratner, and Lieb (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 538-551, 2005, Study 4). In three experiments (N = 300) conducted here, participants chose from a menu of perceptually partitioned options (varieties of candy distributed across bowls). We found no clear evidence of partition dependent choice in children (Experiment 1) and no evidence at all of partition dependence in adults' choices (Experiments 1-3). This was true even when methods were closely matched to those of Fox et al.'s Study 4 (Experiment 3). We conclude that the candy-bowl choice task does not reliably elicit partition dependence and propose possible explanations for the discrepancy between these findings and prior reports. Future work will explore the conditions under which partition dependence in consumer choice does reliably arise.
将选项划分为任意类别已被证明会影响在这些选项之间分配选择或资源的决策；这种现象称为分区依赖。虽然我们在本工作中不质疑分区依赖现象的有效性，但我们确实检查了 Fox、Ratner 和 Lieb（《实验心理学杂志：综合》，134，538-551，2005，研究 4）报告的一个实验范式的稳健性。在这里进行的三项实验（N=300）中，参与者从菜单中选择具有感知分区的选项（分布在碗中的各种糖果）。我们在儿童中没有发现明显的分区依赖选择的证据（实验 1），在成人的选择中也没有发现分区依赖的证据（实验 1-3）。即使方法与 Fox 等人的研究 4（实验 3）非常匹配，也是如此。我们的结论是，糖果碗选择任务不能可靠地引出分区依赖，并且为这些发现与先前报告之间的差异提出了可能的解释。未来的工作将探索在消费者选择中分区依赖可靠出现的条件。
