Preference Formation and Attitude Research

This chapter presents descriptive research on how people formAttitude preferencesPreference and come to make decisions. Although the problem of preference formationPreference formation is a major theme in behavioral decision theoryBehavioral decision theory, it was originally the subject of research in psychology and social psychology. Therefore, this chapter first discusses the position of preference formationPreference formation research in behavioral decision theoryBehavioral decision theory, and then discusses the theory of attitudes in social psychology, which is deeply related to preference formation, to discuss the relationship between attitude theoryAttitude theory and preference formation, and to reinterpret classical attitude theoryAttitude theory in social psychology from the perspective of preferencePreference formation. This chapter points out that although the constitutive concept of “preference formationPreference formation” is an important object of study not only in psychology as a behavioral science but also in social sciences such as economics, which has a significant impact on economic policies in the real world, this issue has not been sufficiently examined theoretically. This chapter then argues that people’s preferencesPreference are not given, as assumed in traditional economics, but are constructed through the decision-making processDecision-making process. Thus, the discussion of preference formationPreference formation in this chapter may call into question the assumption implicit in the social sciences that decisions are based on individual preferences. Finally, this chapter discusses what kinds of explicit and implicit measurementMeasurement of preference attitudesAttitude exist.