Heuristic Issue Substitution RIA can occur even for a “proper” rhetorical issue that accurately corresponds to the policy. The neutral point for a proper rhetorical issue maps over to the policy reference so that opposing rhetorical sides fully align with opposing policy sides. For example, in the binary gamble above, the neutral point for the subjective probability, p ( w ), is 1 / 2 which indeed transforms to a zero wager, the policy reference. Often, however, when faced with a complex decision, people exhibit a behavior known as attribute substitution, in which a judgment on a target attribute is addressed by using a heuristic attribute more accessible to the mind (Kahneman and Frederick 2002). In group discussion, attribute substitution can lead to replacing the proper rhetorical issue by an “improper” rhetorical issue whose neutral point does not map to the policy reference. This misalignment between the rhetorical and policy reference points can cause RIA to vary by policy side which generates differential polarization as described in the next section. To illustrate the variation in RIA caused by heuristic issue substitution, we return to Figure 1. The offset between the policy and rhetorical references signifies that the rhetorical issue displayed is an improper one. 3 While the members of the U triad are all on the same (negative) side of the policy axis, they straddle the rhetorical reference, resulting in the U group being arrayed along the roughly linear part of the curve in contrast to the F group on the shoulder. The U group therefore is subject to a much less pronounced RIA effect than the F group: U$_{2}$ is nearly equidistant from both the moderate U$_{1}$ and the extremist U$_{3}$ along the rhetorical issue. In our experiment involving betting on NFL games, the subjective probability of the favorite winning against the spread (being the “spread victor”) is the proper rhetorical issue and results in equivalent RIA effects for both favorite and underdog 14