The Role of Memory in the Attraction Effect

The attraction effect occurs when the preference between two options is altered by the inclusion of a third, decoy option that is worse than one of the original options. It challenges rational choice theories by showing that preference can change by having an irrelevant option in the choice set. The attraction effect is typically studied in situations where individuals have full access to option information during choice. However, in many real-life situations, people must make choices based on their memory of the options. In three experiments (N = 379), we investigated the attraction effect when people had to rely on their memory when making choices. We show initially that relying on memory eliminated the attraction effect, but also that the attraction effect was recovered with improvements in memory. The results suggest that memory accuracy may be a boundary condition of the attraction effect. We also observed improvements in decoy avoidance and choice accuracy with improvements in memory. Our results are consistent with the representational noise hypothesis (Spektor et al., 2021) where noise (e.g., due to forgetting) disrupts how people represent the relationships among options.