Research has consistently found that goals triggered by environmental cues can influence decision making processes outside of conscious awareness. This lack of awareness led naturally to the presumption that decision makers could not report the activation level of nonconsciously primed goals....

Leader-driven primacy uses initial product information to install a targeted brand as the early leader in a choice between two brands. Biased evaluation of subsequent attributes builds support for the targeted brand, causing the choice itself to be biased. Study 1 finds evidence of this effect...

Extending previous work on biased predecisional processing, we investigate the distortion of information during the evaluation of a single option. A coherence-based account of the evaluation task suggests that individuals will form an initial assessment of favorability toward the option and then...

We show how decision makers can be induced to choose a personally inferior alternative, a strong violation of rational decision making. The binary choice process is traced to reveal the progress of the manipulation. First, the inferior alternative is installed as the leading option by starting...

Leader-driven primacy in consumer choice uses initial product information to install a targeted brand as the early leader. Then the biased evaluation of subsequent attributes builds support for that brand. The end result is that the manipulation of information order impacts the proportion of...

Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluation of new information to support a tentatively preferred option? We test three decision process goals as the potential drivers of such predecisional distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of integrating...