The Impact Of Cognitive Consistency And Associative Reasoning On Judgment And Decision-Making

Abstract

The dissertation is composed of three papers, and attempts to unravel the impact of two potential drivers of biases in judgment and decision-making: cognitive consistency and associative reasoning. The first paper is a literature review of cognitive consistency theories. The seminal paradigm and the major theories it spawned are first described and integrated into a unified framework. In addition, this framework is used to propose a new set of research questions in consumer psychology. The second paper is a methodological paper, which primes cognitive consistency as a goal and tracks its influence on judgment and decision-making. Three initial studies demonstrate that the developed method successfully activates the goal of cognitive consistency. Three additional studies track the influence of cognitive consistency on three cognitive biases: the desirability bias, the influence of expectations on experience, and selective exposure. The third paper investigates associative reasoning as another driver of biases in judgment and decision-making. A method to prime associative reasoning is proposed. Then four studies observe its influence on four biases in judgment and decision-making: the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic, the sunk cost fallacy, and mental model fallacies.