On self-referencing differences in judgment and choice q Sanjay Sood a, * , Mark Forehand b a Anderson School of Management, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA b University of Washington Business School, Box 353200, Seattle, WA 98195-3200, USA Received 7 March 2003 Available online 3 August 2005 Abstract Compared to judgment, choice is argued to elicit more self-referent processing and thereby produce greater subsequent recall of evaluated information. This response mode effect is shown to be dependent upon sufficient visualization to overcome the use of heu- ristic processing during choice. When visualizing prior to the task, choice leads to increased thinking about personal consumption occasions relative to judgment, leading to enhanced recall of vivid (vs. non-vivid) attributes. This proposed interaction of task and visualization was found in two experiments that assessed incidental recall following a choice or judgment task. In experiment 1, par- ticipants recalled more vivid product attribute information after choosing between options than after rating each option separately, but only when instructed to visualize during evaluation. To eliminate a comparison-based explanation of this effect, a second exper- iment was conducted that presented only one option in each category. Participants who evaluated their intention to purchase the option (a judgment equivalent of choice) demonstrated greater recall of vivid product attribute information than did participants who rated their liking for the option, and this recall difference was again moderated by instructions to visualize. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Choice; Decision making; Judgment; Self-referencing; Response mode Understanding differences between judgment and choice tasks is a central concern of decision-making re- search. A large body of research has demonstrated vio- lations of procedure invariance via the preference reversal paradigm, whereby the preference ordering for a pair of gambles reverses across response modes (e.g., Lichtenstein & Slovic, 1971, 1973; Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988; Tversky, Slovic, & Kahneman, 1990). Pref- erence reversals have been explained via a variety of mechanisms, most notably scale compatibility effects and anchoring and adjustment processes (Lichtenstein & Slovic, 1971; Tversky et al., 1988). Related research has investigated process-oriented differences between judgment and choice, focusing on how individuals ac- quire and integrate information in each response mode. These studies have found support for the notion that choice often involves simplifying heuristics where indi- viduals focus on a subset of the available information, whereas judgment often involves holistic processes where individuals examine a more complete set of infor- mation (Billings & Scherer, 1988; Schkade & Johnson, 1989; Senter & Wedell, 1999; Wedell & Senter, 1997). In summary, these cognitive analyses have revealed sev- eral consistent differences in the information processing strategies that individuals use during judgment vs. choice. In this research, we diverge from traditional cognitive perspectives and instead assess whether judgment and choice also differ in the extent to which they prompt self-referent processing, a motivational difference. www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 98 (2005) 144–154 0749-5978/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.05.005 q The authors gratefully acknowledge Lyle Brenner, Itamar Simon- son, and Jim Lattin for guidance on this manuscript; Elizabeth Corneliouson, Kim Maher, and Talin Salibian for help in conducting the experiments. This is truly colloborative work; the order of authorship is reverse alphabetical. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ssood@anderson.ucla.edu (S. Sood), forehand@ u.washington.edu (M. Forehand).