Extant theories of decoy effects on evaluations of attribute values were assessed with respect to their ability to account for a one-dimensional analogue of the asymmetric dominance effect. Parducci's (1965Parducci's ( , 1995 range-frequency theory, Krumhansl's (1978) distance-density model, Tversky's (1977) diagnosticity principle, and reference point theories (e.g., Holyoak & Mah, 1982) were unable to account for this effect. One version of Helson's (1964) adaptation-level theory and our comparisoninduced distortion theory (Choplin & Hummel, 2002) were able to account for the qualitative effect. Quantitative fits revealed that comparison-induced distortion theory provides a better account of this effect than does adaptation-level theory. These results suggest that, in some cases, biases created by language-expressible magnitude comparisons mediate the effects of decoys on evaluation.

It is likely that factors that affect these representations in turn affect the psychological processes that rely on them. The authors conducted 4 experiments to investigate whether language-expressible magnitude comparisons distort mental representations of compared magnitudes. Participants compared magnitudes and estimated those magnitudes in a variety of tasks. Experiments 1 through 3 demonstrated systematic comparison-induced distortions. Experiment 4 demonstrated that comparison-induced distortions might account for the asymmetric dominance effect discussed in the decision-making literature. Potential effects of comparison-induced distortions on other psychological processes (e.g., density effects, order effects, body-size estimation, pain estimation, and consumer decision making) are discussed.

The federal government's primary method of protecting consumers from "predatory lending" has been to enact disclosure laws that were supposed to enable consumers to make informed decisions. This article contends that notwithstanding these disclosure laws, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and lenders have been able to take advantage of certain described cognitive and social psychological phenomena to induce borrowers to enter into predatory loans, and argues that disclosures alone-even the recently revised disclosure forms-are inadequate. To better empower consumers to make informed decisions on their home loans, this article proposes and details a mortgage counseling intervention that contains both "in-person" and interactive computer counseling as a necessary supplement to disclosure laws. Designed properly, such an intervention would more effectively address the cognitive and social psychological barriers to rational decision making than disclosure alone. The article also examines the likely costs and benefits of the proposed mortgage counseling intervention in light of Illinois experience with mortgage counseling and urges policymakers to consider not only the costs of implementing mortgage counseling but also the costs of not providing for this counseling.

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We investigated the mechanisms responsible for the automatic processing of the numerosities represented by digits in the size congruity effect (Henik & Tzelgov, 1982). The algorithmic model assumes that relational comparisons of digit magnitudes (e.g., larger than {8,2}) create this effect. If so, congruity effects ought to require two digits. Memory-based models assume that associations between individual digits and the attributes "small" and "large" create this effect. If so, congruity effects ought only to require one digit. Contrary to the algorithmic model and consistent with memory-based models, congruity effects were just as large when subjects judged the relative physical sizes of small digits paired with letters as when they judged the relative physical sizes of two digits. This finding suggests that size congruity effects can be produced without comparison algorithms.