Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A wealth of experimental evidence shows that, contrary to normative models of choice, peoples preferences are markedlyswayed by the context in which options are presented. Particularly, there exist a well-known triad of effects, dubbed thecontextual effects, which consistently show that preferences change depending on the availability of other options: theattraction effect, the similarity effect, and the compromise effect. In this work, we present the first resource-rational,process-level account of these three contextual effects by extending Nobandegani et al.’s (2018) sample-based expectedutility model to the realm of multi-attribute value-based decision-making. Importantly, our work is consisted with twoempirically well-supported findings: (1) People tend to draw only a few samples in their probabilistic judgment anddecision-making, and (2) People tend to overestimate the probability of extreme events in their judgment.