Problem:Skin cancer from sun exposure is common among farm workers.
Intervention: Support free medical checkups for threatened groups.
Problem:Several Australian mammal species are nearly wiped out by
hunters.
Intervention:Contribute to a fund to provide safe breeding areas for these
species.
One group of subjects was asked to choose which of the two interventions
they would rather support; a second group of subjects was presented with one
issue at a time and asked to determine the largest amount they would be will-
ing to pay for the respective intervention. Because the treatment of cancer in
human beings is generally viewed as more important than the protection of
Australian mammals, the prominence hypothesis predicts that the former will
receive greater support in direct choice than in independent evaluation. This
prediction was confirmed. When asked to evaluate each intervention sepa-
rately, subjects, who might have been moved by these animals’ plight, were
willing to pay more, on average, for safe breeding of Australian mammals than
for free checkups for skin cancer. When faced with a direct choice between
these options, however, most subjects favored free checkups for humans over
safe breeding for mammals. Thus, people may evaluate one alternative more
positively than another when each is evaluated independently, but then reverse
their evaluation when the alternatives are directly compared, which accen-
tuates the prominent attribute.
26.5.3 Weighing Pros and Cons
Consider having to choose one of two options or, alternatively, having to reject
one of two options. Under the assumption of procedure invariance, the two
tasks are interchangeable. In binary choice it should not matter whether people
are asked which option they prefer, or which they would reject: if people prefer
the first they should reject the second, and vice versa. In line with the notion of
compatibility, however, we may expect that the positive features of options
(their pros) will loom larger when choosing, whereas the negative features of
options (their cons) will be weighted more heavily when rejecting. It is natural
to select an option because of its positive features, and to reject an option be-
cause of its negative features.
This account leads to the following prediction: Imagine two options, an
‘‘enriched’’ option, with many positive and many negative features, and an
‘‘impoverished’’ option, with few positive and few negative features. If positive
features are weighed more heavily when choosing than when rejecting and
negative features are weighed more heavily when rejecting than when choos-
ing, then an enriched option could be both chosen and rejected more frequently
than an impoverished option. Consider, for example, the following problem,
which was presented to subjects in two versions that differed only in the brack-
eted questions (Shafir 1993). Half the subjects received one version, the other
half received the other.
Problem 6ðN¼ 170 Þ
Imagine that you serve on the jury of an only-child sole-custody case
following a relatively messy divorce. The facts of the case areDecision Making 613