POST-DECISION CONSOLIDATION, AS A FUNCTION OF THE INSTRUCTIONS TO THEDECISION-MAKER AND OF THE DECISION PROBLEM

The effects of instructions and decision problems on post-decision pro cesses were studied by varying the instructions to subjects. Subjects made a medical policy decision based on information on four attributes in Experiments 1-2. The subjects were given different instructions: ( 1) no instruction at all about a second session, (2) instruction to re member his/her decision until a session a week later, and (3) instruct ion to justify the decision at a later occasion one week later. The re sults indicated post-decision consolidation in the first group, as pre dicted by the Differentiation and Consolidation Theory (Svenson, 1992) . The effect showed up in attractiveness restructuring in support of t he chosen alternative on the most important attributes. The instructio n to remember the decision until a later time increased the consolidat ion effect. Contrary to our expectations, the instruction to later jus tify the decision did not produce any consolidation. This effect was r eplicated in the second experiment and could not be intepreted as a ra ndom result. In a third experiment the decision problem was framed as an environmental pollution problem and it was preceded by a carefully designed booklet presenting arguments for and against different materi als used in manufacturing packages for coffee. Subjects were then aske d to make a choice of the same coffee in two different packages. The d ata indicated no difference in structural consolidation as a result of the instruction to justify or not. The paper concludes with a discuss ion pointing out the importance of the involvement in a decision task for decision differentiation and consolidation.