This research uses Comparison-Induced Distortion theory to explain the role of verbal comparisons in decision making and evaluation processes with implications for public health, consumer choice, and many other fields. Previous research found that verbal comparisons bias evaluations. For example, saying or thinking to oneself that one portion of chocolate is larger than another or that one price is more expensive than another affects judgments of portion size and price. The research includes three separate projects designed to investigate the role of verbal comparisons in the creation of judgment biases that are known to affect everyday decision making.
The first project will investigate the effects of verbally comparing values to a reference point (i.e., comparing a portion to the amount that people typically eat, a price to what people typically pay, and so forth). Usually, people overestimate small differences from these reference points and underestimate large differences. But if verbal comparisons create these biases, then boundary conditions on this pattern of bias ought to be observed. A different pattern of bias would be expected in the range where virtually everyone describes values as "approximately the same" as the reference point, for example; and the words used to describe comparisons also ought to affect evaluations and decisions. The second project will investigate the role of verbal comparisons in the evaluations of values drawn from different types of distributions (i.e., bell-shaped distributions, skewed distributions, and so forth). The effects of verbal comparisons ought to differ across different types of distributions, because values are verbally compared to nearby values and where the nearby values are different across different types of distributions. A 600-calorie hamburger would be judged smaller if it were drawn from a distribution wherein there are many larger hamburgers and only a few smaller hamburgers than if it were drawn from a distribution wherein there are many smaller hamburgers and only a few larger hamburgers. People might then eat more or less depending upon their size evaluation. The third project will investigate the role of verbal comparisons in situations where decoys (nominally irrelevant options) affect decisions. Verbal comparisons between options and decoys might bias evaluations and thereby affect decisions.
