Goal congruency dominates reward value in accounting for behavioral and neural correlates of value-based decision-making

When choosing between options, whether menu items or career paths, we can evaluate how rewarding each one will be, or how congruent it is with our current choice goal (e.g., to point out the best option or the worst one.). Past decision-making research interpreted findings through the former lens, but in these experiments the most rewarding option was always most congruent with the task goal (choosing the best option). It is therefore unclear to what extent expected reward vs. goal congruency can account for choice value findings. To deconfound these two variables, we performed three behavioral studies and an fMRI study in which the task goal varied between identifying the best vs. the worst option. Contrary to prevailing accounts, we find that goal congruency dominates choice behavior and neural activity. We separately identify dissociable signals of expected reward. Our findings call for a reinterpretation of previous research on value-based choice. Decision-making research has confounded the reward value of options with their goal-congruency, as the task goal was always to pick the most rewarding option. Here, authors separately asked participants to select the least rewarding of a set of options, revealing a dominant role for goal congruency.