The Effect of Choice on Older Adult Preferences

Previous research on preferences has indicated that young adults may construct their preferences as a result of their choices. In the present study, the author investigated the effects of aging on preference construction. 80 younger adults and 80 older adults rated how desirable and important they found various vacation attributes, made a choice between two vacation options, and then rated the attributes again. Results suggest that older and younger adults show a similar pattern of preference shift to support their choice, with partial evidence suggesting that older adults shift their preferences slightly more toward the positive. THE EFFECT OF CHOICE ON OLDER ADULT PREFERENCES 3 The Effect of Choice on Older Adult Preferences In contemporary American society, we are rapidly becoming the stewards of an aging populace. By 2030, it is projected that nearly one half of American society will be above the age of 39, nearly 1 in 5 will be over 65, and that we will have more centarians than ever (US Census Bureau 2005). Understanding how we make decisions as we age is as vital a pursuit as ever, considering the ever growing body of research indicating that decision making approaches and strategies change over our life span. Studies indicate that older adults have different goals when making decisions, prefer fewer choices, attend to different stimuli and use different strategies than younger adults (Mather & Carstensten, 2005, Reed, Mikels & Simon, 2008). These age differences require greater understanding so that we can assist older adults in making optimal decisions. While this study does not address these potential policy implications, it does strive to understand what mechanisms drive these changes in decision making. As preferences often underlie decisions and decision making changes as we age, it is important to study age differences in the way preferences are formed. This study aimed to both investigate how older adults change their preferences while making a choice and how this differs from younger adults for a hypothetical choice about a vacation. AGING AND DECISION MAKING Vacations are just one of a myriad of things that older adults make decisions about. When older adults are making choices, like vacations, they may not be attempting to satisfy the same set of goals that younger adults do. Due to a different perspective on how much time they have remaining, they may seek to fulfill emotion regulatory goals rather than knowledge seeking ones (Mather & Carstensen 2005). Do they take a vacation to see and spend time with their family members or do they go to a place they have never been able to see before? How many different destinations would they like to choose from? How confident are they that they made the right choice? What information do they pay attention to when making their decision? THE EFFECT OF CHOICE ON OLDER ADULT PREFERENCES 4 Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen, 2006) is a life-span theory that can shed light on these questions. The theory holds that as adults age, their outlook on the amount of time left in the future changes from being open-ended to limited. This shift subsequently leads to changes in goals from young adulthood, where people generally seek knowledge related goals, to old age, where people often strive for emotion regulatory goals. While the outlook on the amount of time remaining in life is the causal factor in SST, outlook also correlates highly with age, thus casting SST as a theory on aging. The theory therefore suggests that older adults would trend towards focusing on their emotions during a choice while younger adults would focus more on their ability to acquire novel information. As a result of the changes in goals with age, SST suggests a phenomenon called the agerelated positivity effect, which describes age-related valence differences. As older adults shift to more emotion related goals, they attend to more emotional stimuli, but especially positive, as they support an “emotionally-gratifying” state, thus satisfying their original goals (Carstensen & Mikels 2005). Younger adults seem to attend to the opposite end of the valence spectrum, attending more strongly to negative stimuli than positive in some research, or showing no bias in other research (Mather & Carstensen 2005). There is also evidence that older adults recall a greater proportion of positive than negative information, as well as attend more to positive information during the pre-choice period (Lockenhoff & Carstensen 2007). SST was supported as well in the same study when time perspective was adjusted statistically as well as when the participant’s goals were experimentally manipulated towards information gathering, both resulting in the disappearance of memory effects. The positivity effect is important to decision making research in that it provides a mechanism to explain age differences in attention and decision making. Mather and Carstensen (2005) explain that, through the positivity effect, SST has strong implications for how we make, and remember, decisions. Since adults are already biased to attend to positive or negative THE EFFECT OF CHOICE ON OLDER ADULT PREFERENCES 5 stimuli, it would follow that this influences the information they take in to make decisions. As these biases change with age, it would also stand to reason that the evaluation of their choices and decisions would change as well. This is supported by research in choice supportive memory, where Mather and Johnson (2000) explain that decisions are remembered in a more positive light after they are made if emotional cues are attended to while the decision is made. Age effects in the study also suggested that older adults, who are more emotionally focused, are more likely to remember choices more positively than younger adults. These memories could certainly effect later decisions in the form of altered preferences. A 2007 study by Henkel & Mather indicates that these misrememberences are attributable to later biases, and not ones held at the time of the choice. As a result, it seems that our biases are altered by the choice, and since preferences are personal biases influencing choice, it could be inferred that our choices effect our preferences. One clear preference change with age is the amount of choice desired. As adults age, they desire fewer options and value increased choice less when making decisions, possibly in an effort to reduce cognitive load and remain able to make the best choice (Reed, Mikels, & Simon, 2008; Mikels, Reed, & Simon, 2009). This preference shift is consistent with SST’s predicted shift in decision making strategies, where avoiding regret and maximizing satisfaction (and thus satisfying emotional regulatory goals) can influence decisions (Mellers & McGraw 2001). Since preferences are clearly closely tied to what we chose when we make decisions, it is important to examine whether some of these age-related changes in decision making are tied to changes in preferences, not only for how many options they have, but for how they construct those preferences in the first place. PREFERENCE CONSTRUCTION THROUGH CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION Preference theory is currently split into competing theories centered around the idea that preferences are at the least, flexible (Slovic 1995), or at most completely temporary and invented (Johnson, Steffel, & Goldstein, 2005). This research has led to the theory of spreading of THE EFFECT OF CHOICE ON OLDER ADULT PREFERENCES 6 alternatives, where we subconsciously alter our preferences at the point of choice to make a choice between two similar options. This spreading of results in the difference in the evaluation of attributes between the two choices being perceived as much larger than pre-choice data indicated initially. These changes are only stated to exist during the decision process and not afterward (Harmon-Jones & Mills 1999). Another competing model of choice and preference to that of stable preferences is based on the opposite idea: preferences are constantly constructed based on previous choices made, not necessarily the one ahead. It is called Preference Construction. Preference Construction was proposed in a 1981 work on preferences (Tversky & Kahneman). Though theories such as Preference Construction and Spreading of Alternatives give a mechanism to the formation of preferences, they do not offer solid explanations as to the how and why of such mechanisms. The Constraint-Satisfaction model of Preference Construction proposes to do this by offering the following basic mechanism: We engage in systematic satisfaction of both internal and external constraints until a choice can be reached (Simon, Krawcyzk & Holyoak 2004). Research done by Simon et al. (2001) has provided support for this model in younger adults. Multiple studies have indicated that the theory is not domain specific, consistent across demographics, and in a hypothetical situation, has a very short effect length (Simon Krawcyzk & Holyoak 2004, Simon & Holyoak 2002, Simon et al. 2007). More importantly, these studies have all demonstrated that not only do we construct new preferences after a choice, but our new preferences align to support the option we chose. These new preferences indicate new biases that were not present at the time of the choice and could be similar in effect to those that Henkel & Mather (2007) found when they induced false memories in participants by telling them they selected a choice other than the one they had actually chosen, and then had them recall past decisions erroneously. Participant biases, after the erroneous recall, were aligned to support the THE EFFECT OF CHOICE ON OLDER ADULT PREFERENCES 7 choice participants believed they had made, instead of the one they actually had. Coupled with SSTs indication that we change strategies for making decisions as we age, which could indicate differing systems for satisfying constraints, age could impact preference cons