When and Why Opposition (vs. Support) Framing Increases Choice Confidence and Willingness to Pay

As part of a long history of interest in valence asymmetries in judgment, research has examined the impact of support-oppose framing, in which preferences framed as opposition to a nonpreferred option are “stronger” than preferences framed as support for a preferred option (Bizer & Petty, 2005; Catapano & Tormala, 2021). The present research sheds new light on this phenomenon by adjudicating between several possible mechanisms and identifying an important boundary condition for the effect. In addition, we demonstrate that the effect extends to a novel, theoretically informative domain (consumer preferences) and a consequential outcome (willingness to pay). Two studies systematically vary the extremity of the preferred and nonpreferred options to reveal that opposition-framing strengthens people’s attitudes and increases willingness to pay only when choosing between two options of similar extremity (i.e., when the preferred option is liked as much as the nonpreferred option is disliked), but not when extremity varies. These results help rule out certain plausible hypotheses for the mechanism (e.g., matching), and suggest that opposition-framing strengthens attitudes because opposition carries greater psychological weight and helps to disambiguate the valence in which attitudes are based. We discuss theoretical implications of these new insights with respect for mechanisms in valence asymmetries more broadly, as well as practical implications for persuasion strategies in applied domains.