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TOWARD A COMPARISON-INDUCED DISTORTION THEORY OF JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

This chapter demonstrates how biases produced by verbal comparisons (Choplin & Hummel, 2002) might produce a variety of phenomena in the psychology of judgment and decision making. The biases produced by verbal comparisons cause people to overestimate the importance of small differences and underestimate the importance of large differences. Simulations will demonstrate that overestimating the importance of small differences and underestimating the importance of large differences from a reference point (default value, status quo, etc.) would produce s-shaped evaluation functions. Simulations will also demonstrate that overestimating the importance of small differences and underestimating the importance of large differences from other contextual stimuli would produce distribution-density effects (often called frequency effects). Because large differences are underestimated, when the variance in people’s unbiased estimates is large as in anchoring effects, these biases will often look like assimilation effects. Biases produced by verbalized social comparisons would also overestimate the importance of small differences and underestimate the importance of large differences so that moderate downward comparisons will produce higher evaluations of the self than will extreme downward comparisons and moderate upward comparisons will produce lower evaluations of the self than will extreme upward comparisons. Comparison strategies might also help explain decoy effects such as asymmetric dominance effects and phantom decoy effects. Testable and falsifiable assumptions of this model are described thereby laying a foundation for future empirical research.