Magnitude comparisons distort mental representations of magnitude.

Abstract

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.

Comparison-induced decoy effects

“…These results suggest that comparison-induced distortion theory provides a better account of the one-dimensional decoy effects observed in Experiments 2 and 4 than does adaptation-level theory. Furthermore, comparison-induced distortion theory can account for the changes in attributevalue evaluation found in the traditional, two-dimensional ADE (Choplin & Hummel, 2002), and adaptation-level theory cannot.…”

“…We pitted Helson's (1964) adaptation-level theory and Choplin and Hummel's (2002) comparison-induced distortion theory against each other by fitting their predictions to the observed results. The quantitative predictions of adaptation-level theory (formalized in Equation 1) and of comparison-induced distortion theory (formalized in Equations 2A through 4B) were fit to the results of Experiments 2 and 4.…”

“…Adding a decoy potentially changes the mean (Helson, 1964), the range (Parducci, 1965(Parducci, , 1995Volkmann, 1951), and the density or frequency (Krumhansl, 1978;Parducci, 1965Parducci, , 1995 of the distribution. Adding a decoy also potentially changes reference points (Frederick & Loewenstein, 1999;Holyoak & Mah, 1982), likely groupings between items (Tversky, 1977), and the relationships between items (Choplin & Hummel, 2002). Because theories of how these factors affect attributevalue evaluation often make conflicting predictions, decoy effects allow us to pit theories of attribute-value evaluation directly against each other.…”

“…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.…”

“…Research on the ADE has concentrated on three factors that are each capable of explaining the effect: changes in the weight given to each attribute dimension (Ariely & Wallsten, 1995; but see Wedell & Pettibone, 1996); changes in the evaluation of particular attribute values lying on each of the dimensions (Choplin & Hummel, 2002;Huber et al, 1982;Wedell & Pettibone, 1996); and the relationships between options used to justify one choice over its alternatives (Roe, Busemeyer, & Townsend, 2001;Simonson, 1989;Wedell, 1991). Our purpose in pursuing the research reported here was to study one of the three factors-namely, changes in the evaluation of attribute values-in greater depth.…”