Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 182, January 2018, Pages 46-54
Acta Psychologica

The order of information processing alters economic gain-loss framing effects

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.11.013Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Left and right position of options influenced choice in economic gain-loss framing.

  • Left-gaze bias was observed while evaluating gamble and certain options.

  • Sequential presentation of decision options had similar effect on choice.

  • We show that the order of information processing alters economic gain-loss framing.

Abstract

Adaptive decision making requires analysis of available information during the process of choice. In many decisions that information is presented visually – which means that variations in visual properties (e.g., salience, complexity) can potentially influence the process of choice. In the current study, we demonstrate that variation in the left-right positioning of risky and safe decision options can influence the canonical gain-loss framing effect. Two experiments were conducted using an economic framing task in which participants chose between gambles and certain outcomes. The first experiment demonstrated that the magnitude of the gain-loss framing effect was greater when the certain option signaling the current frame was presented on the left side of the visual display. Eye-tracking data during task performance showed a left-gaze bias for initial fixations, suggesting that the option presented on the left side was processed first. Combination of eye-tracking and choice data revealed that there was a significant effect of direction of first gaze (i.e. left vs. right) as well as an interaction between gaze direction and identity of the first fixated information (i.e. certain vs. gamble) regardless of frame. A second experiment presented the gamble and certain options in a random order, with a temporal delay between their presentations. We found that the magnitude of gain-loss framing was larger when the certain option was presented first, regardless of left and right positioning, only in individuals with lower risk-taking tendencies. The effect of presentation order on framing was not present in high risk-takers. These results suggest that the sequence of visual information processing as well as their left-right positioning can bias choices by changing the impact of the presented information during risky decision making.

Introduction

Decisions depend not only on objective information about alternatives, but also on how that information is presented and perceived. When decision information is presented visually, as is most commonly the case in both laboratory experiments and natural settings, decision processes are influenced by a diverse set of perceptual factors (Dilla et al., 2010, Eppler and Platts, 2009, Jarvenpaa, 1990, Kelton et al., 2010, Lurie and Mason, 2007, Orquin and Mueller Loose, 2013, Recarte and Nunes, 2003, Savikhin et al., 2008, Speier, 2006). Previous studies demonstrate that visual features such as the salience and complexity of presentation formats alter both the process of decision making and subsequent choices (Jarvenpaa, 1990, Speier, 2006). Most such work takes an applied perspective, such as when investigating how advertising formats influence real-life consumer behavior (Lurie, Mason, Lurie, & Mason, 2016). For example, positioning an item at the point of initial gaze directs attention to that item and increases the likelihood of its selection (Chandon et al., 2009, Sütterlin et al., 2008). While such effects in natural settings are clear – and drive advertising and marketing efforts – relatively less is known about how visual presentation alters core phenomena in decision science, as typically studied using laboratory tasks involving complex decision scenarios.

In the current study, we demonstrate that simple variation of the left-right presentation of options can influence the gain-loss framing effect, one of the most widely studied phenomena in behavioral economics (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984). We adopt the most common (and simple) format for laboratory studies of risky decision making, in which a gamble option is presented alongside a certain option (Burnett et al., 2010, De Martino et al., 2006, Huettel et al., 2006, Martin Braunstein et al., 2014, Porcelli and Delgado, 2009, Stanton et al., 2011). Often, a gamble option is presented as a pie chart representing the probabilities of winning larger or smaller amounts, while the certain option involves a sure intermediate amount. In most cases, the gamble and certain options are arranged horizontally with left-right order counterbalanced across trials. Such studies assume that choices depend on the objective features of the choice options (i.e., the magnitudes and probabilities of rewards) and not how those features are presented (e.g., their left-right ordering).

Yet, work in other domains shows that left-right positioning of visual information can bias diverse aspects of cognition. Numerous studies have found leftward bias during visual-spatial tasks (e.g., line bisection tasks); typically, scanning of visual space starts from the left and moves toward the right (Durgin et al., 2008, Fershtman and Gneezy, 2001, Guo et al., 2009, Jewell and McCourt, 2000, Speedie et al., 2002). Sequential processing of information items from left to right is strongly related with the direction of reading – hence the term “reading bias” - which also happens from left to right in most cultures (Chokron and De Agostini, 1995, Chokron and Imbert, 1993, Kazandjian and Chokron, 2008). This left-to-right bias has a significant influence on the metal representation of number (Dehaene et al., 1993, Gevers et al., 2003, Zorzi et al., 2006) and time (Fuhrman and Boroditsky, 2010, Ouellet et al., 2010, Pérez, 2011, Weger and Pratt, 2008), aesthetic-preference judgments (Chokron & De Agostini, 2000), perception of facial affects (Vaid & Singh, 1989) and allocation of attention (Ariel et al., 2011, Spalek and Hammad, 2005). These studies demonstrate the pervasive influence of left-right gaze bias on human cognition.

The effect of gaze or reading bias on economic decision making has not been studied frequently, despite the many studies of how other features of visual processing (e.g. gaze duration) can affect choice behavior (Armel et al., 2008, Gidlöf et al., 2013, Krajbich et al., 2010, Shimojo et al., 2003). Several studies have looked at how the sequence of information presentation influences clinical (Chapman et al., 1996, Cunnington et al., 1997) and judicial decision making (Kerstholt & Jackson, 1998). Specifically, these studies suggest that when information is processed sequentially, earlier processing leads to greater impact in decision making. A similar phenomenon has also been conceptualized as the primacy effect in personality judgment (Asch, 1946, Jones et al., 1968), in which opinions about a person depend upon the order in which a set of personality descriptions are processed. Specifically, presenting positive personality traits followed by negative personality traits leads to an overall positive impression, while negative traits followed by positive leads to a negative impression (Asch, 1946). These and many other studies support the conjecture that a similar effect could exist in economic decision making.

Here, we examined left-right presentation bias in a prototypic example of economic choice: gain-loss framing (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984). In Experiment 1, participants were given an endowment on each trial, which could be considered as a reference point. The two decision options were 1) a gamble option of keeping or losing the whole endowment with a designated probability or 2) a certain option of keeping or losing a fixed amount of money from the endowment (Fig. 1). The gain or loss framing of the decision problem was signaled by the description of the certain option. We used eye tracking to monitor the gaze of participants, which in turn can be used to generate quantitative markers of information processing prior to decisions (e.g., time spent viewing each information item, patterns of successive fixations). In Experiment 2, we manipulated the order of information processing in this task by presenting the two decision options in a temporal sequence, such that one option appeared first on one side of the screen followed by the other option on the other side of the screen. Together, these experiments allowed us to evaluate whether the order of information acquisition alters subsequent decisions in a gain-loss framing task.

Section snippets

Participants

Data were collected from 96 young adults (age: 23 ± 3.7 years) from the Durham, NC community. Eye-tracking data was collected from a subset of 63 participants (age: 23 ± 3.8 years), thus the results pertaining to eye-tracking data were obtained from analysis with this subset of participants. All study participants provided written informed consent under a protocol approved by the Duke University Institutional Review Board. Participants were compensated with $12, along with a monetary bonus ranging

Experiment 2

Our first experiment provided strong evidence for an unexpected effect of left-right position upon gain-loss economic framing. The eye-tracking data proposed two potential mechanisms through which this effect can be explained: the sequence and positioning of information presentation. In order to clarify which of these factors contributes to the difference in the degree of gain-loss framing, we designed a similar risky framing task in which we manipulated both the sequence and left-right

General discussion

The effects of visual information presentation upon decision making have been widely studied, especially in the areas of marketing and consumer behavior (Ashby et al., 2015, Halevy and Chou, 2014, Rebollar et al., 2015, van der Laan et al., 2015). One important mechanism by which visual display can influence decision making is by affecting the order of information processing (e.g., left-gaze bias or reading bias). It has been well established that changes in the order in which options are

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