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LIT-1976: Where do our preferences come from? How hard decisions shape our preferences

1 min read

Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1517), from the publisher's open-access PDF; worth reading as a short statement of the view that preferences form during hard choices, through fixation, rather than only after them through dissonance reduction. It is an Opinion article with a tentative model resting mainly on the author's 2019 study, and its attentional step is bottom-up capture by salience.
Version2
Tagsneuroscience, motivation
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1517 — Voigt — How hard decisions shape our preferences
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1326 — In Voigt's model of hard decisions, when two options are valued equally the value differential is too small to choose (conflict, dACC), and the tie is broken during the choice by fixation: precuneus allocates spatial attention bottom-up to the salient item and dlPFC holds it in working memory, which both settles the choice and raises that item's value, a change that lasts only if the choice is remembered (hippocampus)

Graph View

Voigt, K. (2022). Where do our preferences come from? How hard decisions shape our preferences. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 16, 956307.

Key takeaways

  • Choice-induced preference change is proposed to arise during hard choices, through fixation, not only after them (NOTE-1517).
  • The tie-breaking attention is bottom-up: precuneus to the salient item, dlPFC holding it (THEORY-1326, Proposed).
  • Evidence correlational; an Opinion article, not a review.

Standing in the record

The model Jennings (LIT-1963, p. 25) takes her stalemate mechanism from: with equally valued options, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and precuneus raise attention on one, allowing a decision and an update of its value, so that hard choices shape later preferences. THEORY-1341 rests on it at second hand. A Frontiers Opinion article, open access; read in NOTE-1517, which finds the tie-breaking attention bottom-up and the value update correlational.

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