Pain and Preferences: Observed Decisional Conflict and the Convergence of Preferences
研究发现，观察他人做决策时的情绪冲突和痛苦，会使观察者的偏好向该决策者趋同，即做出相似选择，这一效应由共情和更强的共同身份感驱动。
Decision making often entails conflict. In many situations, the symptoms of such decisional conflict are conspicuous. This article explores an important and unexamined question: How does observing someone else experiencing decisional conflict impact our own preferences? The authors show that observing others’ emotional conflict and agony over an impending decision makes the observer’s preferences converge to those of the conflicted actor (i.e., choose similarly). Thus this article contributes to the social influence literature by demonstrating that observers’ preferences are not only influenced by an actor’s ultimate choice, but also by the process leading to this choice. For example, in one experiment, participants’ real monetary donations to one of two charities converged to those of a paid confederate who agonized over the decision. Six studies demonstrate this effect and show that it is triggered by empathy and a greater sense of shared identity with the conflicted actor. Accordingly, the studies show the effect is more pronounced for individuals with a greater tendency to empathize with others, and that convergence occurs only if participants deem the actor’s conflict warranted given the decision at hand. The authors also demonstrate important implications of this effect in contexts of group decision making.