Behavioral contrast in a two-option analogue task of financial decision making.

College students played a stock-market game on a computer. Two fake markets paid small cash at random times. Researchers then shut off one market’s payouts while the other kept paying.

The team tracked how many clicks each student made to each market before and after the cutoff.

When market A stopped paying, students quickly dropped it. At the same moment they poured twice as many clicks into the still-paying market B.

This jump is classic behavioral contrast—behavior in the unchanged option spikes simply because the other option got worse.

Roper (1978) saw the same swing in real life. Cincinnati added a 20-cent charge for local directory calls. Overnight, a million people quit using that line and kept calling the still-free long-distance number. Lab and city both show choice shifts after payoff change.

Fontes et al. (2018) looked at the dark side of contrast. They punished rats for pressing a new lever and saw the old, extinguished lever pressing come roaring back. Both studies prove that changing one contingency ripples into other responses.

Ainslie et al. (2003) bundled three rewards in a row and got rats to pick the larger-later option more often. Like Preston (1994), reward structure—not amount—steered choice, underscoring that how you deliver payoff can matter more than size.

Your client’s world is full of two-option moments: work first or play on the tablet, ask nicely or scream for juice. If you weaken one option (extinction, response cost, time-out), expect a sudden jump in the other behavior even if you did not strengthen it. Plan for that spike so you can praise it and keep it, not mistake it for problem behavior.