Preference and the contextual basis of ideals in judgment and choice

Four experiments assessed preferences for schematic faces. In Experiment 1, eye gap and nose width were manipulated separately, and effects of shifting the range of values were assessed. Descriptive ratings of width showed contrast effects in accordance with A. Parducci's (1995) range-frequency theory. Evaluative ratings of pleasantness showed reversals of preference ordering that were modeled as shifts in ideal points toward the means of the contextual distributions. In Experiments 2 and 3, similar effects of context on preference were demonstrated in a trinary-choice task in which faces varied only in eye gap. In Experiment 4, eye gap and nose width were manipulated together, resulting in systematic contextual shifts of the ideal face within the 2-dimensional attribute space. The results demonstrated the pervasive effects of context on the construction of ideals determining preference and underlying attitudes. In many preference domains, more is better. For example, when all other attributes are held constant, increasing monetary gains for an alternative increases preference strength for that alternative. In such domains there is