We had Dr. Takao Noguchi, from UCL, giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psycholopy Colloquium this week . Takao presented work on an account of context effects using decisions by sampling. Here’s the abstract for his talk:

“The attraction, compromise, and similarity effects in multi-alternative decision making demonstrate that the preference for an alternative is not independent of the other alternatives in the choice set. To explain these context effects, we propose the multi-alternative decision by sampling model. The model has three components: 1) an alternative is evaluated through a series of pair-wise comparisons on single attribute values, 2) similar alternatives are compared more often, and 3) relatively small differences in attribute values are ignored. We discuss empirical evidence for each of these components, and address how multi-alternative decision by sampling explains context effects in multi-alternative choice.”