Shane Frederick
Behavioural scientist whose paper asked where the attraction effect actually operates and found the answer much narrower than its citation count implied.
Who they are
Frederick works at Yale on judgment and decision making. The 2014 paper with Leonard Lee and Ernest Baskin examined the stimuli used across the attraction effect literature rather than running another demonstration.
Key papers
Frederick, S., Lee, L., & Baskin, E. (2014). The limits of attraction. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(4), 487-507.
Key ideas
Nearly every demonstration uses stylised representations in which every product dimension is a number.
The effects do not typically occur when consumers experience the product, or when even one attribute is represented perceptually.
The authors question the practical significance of the effect, which is the sentence that almost never travels with the finding.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1509/jmr.12.0061