Tradeoff-induced Decision Anxiety: Unintended Negative Effects on Preferences for Decision Aids

As computer-based decision aids become more widely available – both online and on the office desktop, better insights are needed into how their design features influence people’s willingness to use them. This research hypothesizes and shows that the extent to which decision aids require decision makers to explicitly confront difficult tradeoffs increases their decision anxiety, undermining their preferences for using the decision aid. In a counterbalanced withinsubjects experiment (N=153), participants used two decision aids, one of which required the user to make explicit tradeoff judgments to a greater degree than the other. Validated multi-item scales were used to measure decision anxiety, perceived effort, perceived accuracy, and preference for the decision aid. We found that decision anxiety mediated between the decision aid (high tradeoff difficulty versus low tradeoff difficulty) and preferences. Further, perceived effort and perceived accuracy mediated between decision anxiety and preferences. These findings suggest that negative affect induced by tradeoff difficulty is an antecedent to cognitive appraisals of computerized decision aids. Thus the present research extends prior cognitive conceptualizations of decision aid preference by incorporating affective impacts of design features.