Division of Strategy, Management, and Organisation, Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University.
Department of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2017 Sep;146(9):1234-1246. doi: 10.1037/xge0000351.
Choice is a behavioral act that has a variety of well-documented motivational consequences-it fosters independence by allowing people to simultaneously express themselves and influence the environment. Given the link between independence and analytic thinking, the current research tested whether choice also leads people to think in a more analytic rather than holistic manner. Four experiments demonstrate that making choices, recalling choices, and viewing others make choices leads people to think more analytically, as indicated by their attitudes, perceptual judgments, categorization, and patterns of attention allocation. People who made choices scored higher on a subjective self-report measure of analytic cognition compared to whose did not make a choice (pilot study). Using an objective task-based measure, people who recalled choices rather than actions were less influenced by changes in the background when making judgments about focal objects (Experiment 1). People who thought of others' behaviors as choices rather than actions were more likely to group objects based on categories rather than relationships (Experiment 2). People who recalled choices rather than actions subsequently allocated more visual attention to focal objects in a scene (Experiment 3). Together, these experiments demonstrate that choice has important yet previously unexamined consequences for basic psychological processes such as attention and cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record
选择是一种具有多种有充分记录的动机后果的行为动作——它通过允许人们同时表达自己并影响环境来促进独立性。鉴于独立性和分析思维之间的联系，当前的研究测试了选择是否也会导致人们以更分析而不是整体的方式思考。四项实验表明，做出选择、回忆选择和观察他人做出选择会促使人们更具分析性思维，这表现在他们的态度、感知判断、分类和注意力分配模式上。与没有做出选择的人相比，做出选择的人在主观的分析认知自我报告测量中得分更高（初步研究）。使用基于客观任务的测量方法，与回忆动作相比，当人们对焦点对象进行判断时，回忆选择的人受背景变化的影响较小（实验 1）。将他人的行为视为选择而不是动作的人更有可能根据类别而不是关系对物体进行分组（实验 2）。与回忆动作相比，回忆选择的人随后会在场景中更多地将视觉注意力分配给焦点对象（实验 3）。总的来说，这些实验表明，选择对注意力和认知等基本心理过程具有重要但以前未被检查的后果。
