Are You Making the Right Choice? How Deciding Impacts Food Evaluation and Judgment

Abstract

Traditional approaches in studying decision making typically use artificial or well-defined lab stimuli to investigate changes in the perception of choices. However, the processes of how people generate, evaluate, and integrate attributes of real-world choices are less-studied and understood. In this study, we used food as an example of the real-world stimuli to investigate how deciding between options can accentuate the differences in the perception of their attributes. Specifically, we examined whether making decisions would accentuate the differences between food items and increase the differences in subsequent judgments of pleasure, healthiness, and overall value for similar food pairs. We found that the accentuation effect only occurred for pleasure and overall value judgments of the food but not for healthiness judgment. We propose multiple explanations to account for these results.