128 Understanding Rational Decision Making
Audiences also tend to recall information that is relevant to their decisions in an attribute-basedway. In a study of consumer recall, consumers read about three brands of color televisions: Sanyo,
Philco, and Sharp. Then after a short delay, the consumers were asked to choose one of the brands.
Consumers recalled product attributes and made attribute-based choices. Consumers did not recall
their overall evaluations of the three brands or use them to make alternative-based choices.^219 As
this study illustrates, when consumers make a decision based on memory, they conduct an attri-
bute-based search of their memories, which determines their comparison process and ultimately
their choice of brands.^220
Constraints on the Search Process
Audiences rarely have time to conduct a thorough search and fi ll all of the slots in their activated
schema. Consequently, audiences tend to search for the values of the most important decision
criteria or attributes fi rst. In a study of consumer decision making, consumers chose products
from three product categories: CD players, clock radios, and compact refrigerators. Each product
category was represented by a set of 20 attributes. The later the consumers accessed an attribute’s
value, the less weight they gave it when they made their decisions.^221
As the number of attributes presented to consumers increases, the proportion of the attri-bute values they search for decreases.^222 When audiences face severe time pressure, they may
search for only one or two of the most important attribute values^223 and fail to use other
important attribute values when making their choice.^224 Whether under time pressure or not,
audiences tend to consider only a small set of alternatives when making decisions.^225 For many
product categories consumers consider only two to eight brands on average.^226 As time pres-
sure increases audiences stop searching for positive information and instead search for negative
information about each alternative in an effort to eliminate inferior alternatives as quickly as
possible.^227
Even with ample time, the audience will often end its information-acquisition process longbefore they have processed all of the relevant information available to them due to the limited
capacity of working memory.^228 As we have seen, consumers usually process only a small propor-
tion of the information relevant to deciding among products and services,^229 especially when the
products or services are not highly important to them.^230 Reviews of studies of consumers using
information display boards (a form of decision matrix) to make purchasing decisions confi rm that
as the number of alternatives and attributes displayed on the boards increases, the proportion of the
available information used decreases.^231
Information Integration
As audience members acquire the information they need to fi ll their schema slots, they begin to
compare and integrate that information in order to arrive at a decision. The information integra-
tion process has two major stages: the valuation stage , or the assignment of attribute values to each
alternative, and the integration stage , or the application of a choice rule for comparing and decid-
ing among alternatives. During the valuation stage, audience members compute missing attribute
values and convert the values of non-comparable alternatives into a common currency. During
the integration stage, audience members combine attribute values using either a compensatory or
noncompensatory choice rule.^232
Brain Regions Activated. Neuroscientists fi nd that the valuation stage involves the ventrome-dial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) of both brain hemispheres (see Figure 3.5 , p. 108). If no attribute
values are provided to the audience, the vmPFC will automatically compute them. Simply asking