A comment on "Predictable Effects of Visual Salience"
Li and Camerer (2022) examine whether attention automatically captured by visual features can influence economic decisions. In their first experiment, they find that visual salience affects people’s choices between items, leading to systematic mistakes even when salience is unrelated to the items’ actual value. First, we successfully computationally reproduce the main claims of the experiment, but uncover one minor coding error, which has no effect on the studies’ main results. Second, using a larger, representative US sample (N = 418) we replicate both the significance and direction of the main estimates, finding that salience had an even stronger effect on economic choices. Furthermore, these replicated results withstand our robustness test.