| For over fifty years, there is a view among psychologist that the choices people make affect their preferences. Brehm pointed out that after having made a choice between two objects evaluated as equally desirable, people rated the chosen item as more desirable and the rejected item as less desirable than during the first evaluation. Since this initiating experiment, many studies have replicated this choice-induced preference means. This effect has generally been interpreted for the cognitive-dissonance-reduction assumption. Under these conditions, knowing that the choice conflicts with the desirable side of the rejected item and with the undesirable side of the chosen one elicits discomfort. People can reduce the discomfort by depreciating the rejected option and overvaluing the chosen one. However, this classical interpretation is still debated.Recently, this intriguing effect was also revealed in amnesic patients who didn't even remember which item they had chosen. Indeed, young children and capuchin monkeys have also been found this effect when they choosing between different color chocolates, even if the blind choices may induce preferences. Some studies adapted the free-choice paradigm and found that sensory preferences can be implicitly shaped by explicit choices. They observed that choice-induced preference mechanism would be found for both remembered and forgotten choices. These examples indicated that choice induced re-evaluation is mediated by comparatively automatic processes that do not necessarily rely on explicit memory or highly evolved cognitive mechanisms.These result challenged the traditional interpretation of cognitive dissonance reduction.Many foreign studies found the spreading of alternatives in Westerners. The Westerners showed their personal preference through choosing which had an impact on these preferences. However, the cross-cultural study had not found the effect in the Easterners. The researchers also found that European Canadians justified their choices more when they made them for themselves, whereas Asian Canadians justified their choices more when they made them for a friend. Using free-choice paradigm and un-free choice condition, domestic researchers found that the Easterners had shown the effect when choosing for friends but not for themselves. The research demonstrates that, just like Westerners, East Asians do join in rationalization of their decisions. However, the effect had been researched by only a single choice. Recently, studies found that the effect through numerous decisions for Westerners. For Easterners which modesty as a virtue, we may be not observed the effect through employing a limited number of decisions. It is necessary to use alternative way to do many decisions to examine the rationalization for the Easterners. Compared with similar studies in abroad, the innovation of this study depends on the fact that study the effect of choosing for preference for the cultural specificity of the spread alternatives, starting from the cultural background of our country, using numerous decisions and setting a new experimental situation which let participants imagine choosing between two working city.Therefore, this study used two types of experimental paradigm(the free-choice paradigm and the un-free choice paradigm), two experimental materials(touring city words and employment city words), to explore the internal mechanism of the spread alternatives through doing numerous choices. The result found that there are the rationalization of their decisions whether choosing for self or friend, and the experimental results were of consistency cross-paradigm.The study found that the way of choose and the choosing contexts influenced the choice attitudes. Whether choosing for self or friend, we found the spread alternatives. The study explored the function of the mere choices for preference. Just imagining the positive future events or important events, we can found the rationalization of the selection, which removed the effect of possession to choice.
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