Abstract The attraction effect in decision making refers to how preferences are influenced by an inferior option in the choice set. Recent studies challenged the robustness of attraction effect by manipulating the distance between decoy and target in perceptual decision‐making tasks. However, previous manipulation of the distance was not comprehensive and systematic enough. Whether the influence of distance between decoy and target on attraction effect would occur in high‐level decisions remains unclear. The present study conducted five experiments (two on perceptual decisions and three on preferential decisions) where the distance of the decoy to the target option was systematically manipulated. We found that the distance of the decoy to the target systematically changes the strength and the direction of the attraction effect and sometimes causes its opposite: repulsion effect. Specifically, such change of the context effect (from attraction to repulsion) follows a U‐shape function (technically regarding the relative choice share of the target option [RST] as a function of the target–decoy distance), which is in the shape of convex in the perceptual decisions but concave in the domain of preferential decisions. Our findings show how the distance of decoy to target influences the robustness of attraction effect in preferential and perceptual decisions.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.