Freedom of Choice, Ease of Use, and the Formation of Interface Preferences1
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How does users’ freedom of choice, or the lack thereof, affect interface preferences? The research reported in this article approaches this question from two theoretical perspectives. The first of these argues that an interface with a dominant market share benefits from the absence of competition because users acquire skills that are specific to that particular interface, which in turn reduces the probability that they will switch to a new competitor interface in the future. By contrast, the second perspective proposes that the advantage that a market leader has in being able to install a set of non-transferable skills in its user base is offset by a psychological force that causes humans to react against perceived constraints on their freedom of choice. We test a research model that incorporates the key predictions of these two theoretical perspectives in an experiment involving consequential interface choices. We find strong support for the second perspective, which builds upon the theory of psychological reactance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it