ABSTRACT
It has recently been shown that the compatibility between input and output is also a factor in how people construct their preferences in reasoning and decision making. Shafir (1995) has argued that compatibility may contribute to a broad range of biases, including confirmatory biases (Barsalou, 1992), congruence biases (Baron, 1994), verification biases (Johnson-Laird and Wason, 1970) and matching biases (Evans, 1984, 1989). It is argued that violations of the normative principles underlying these forms of biases are due to people’s tendency to focus on those instances that are more compatible with the instructions or with the tested hypotheses. An implication of these assumptions is that compatibility between the way in which decision alternatives are described and the way responses are expressed has an impact on how preferences are finally constructed (see, e.g., Slovic, 1995, for a review).
