ABSTRACT
W ho is more to blame for pollution: traffic or industry? As is often thecase, the answer depends on how the question is asked (see alsoChapter 15). When asked to compare traffic with industry, 45% of the respondents in a survey blamed traffic as the larger source of air pollution. But when respondents were instead asked to compare industry with traffic, only 24% reported traffic as the larger culprit (Wänke, Schwarz & Noelle-Neumann, 1995). Although both ways of phrasing are equivalent in terms of formal logic, the direction of comparison – whether traffic is the subject of the comparison and industry the referent, or vice versa – has a significant and non-trivial effect on the resulting judgments. Many other examples attest that reversing the direction of comparison may result in preference reversals and other inconsistencies (e.g., that China is more similar to North Korea than North Korea is similar to China; Tversky, 1977). This influence of presenting a stimulus either as the grammatical subject or the referent of a comparison has been documented for various comparison judgments, a wide range of stimuli, and many different languages, such as English (e.g., Dhar & Simonson, 1992; Mussweiler, 2001; Srull and Gaelick, 1983), French (e.g., Codol, 1987), German (e.g., Schwarz & Scheuring, 1989; Wänke, 1996; Wänke et al., 1995), Dutch (Hoorens, 1995), and Hebrew (e.g., Tversky, 1977). All in all, direction-of-comparison effects represent a rather ubiquitous and robust phenomenon and they seem to reflect a rather fundamental process that is not specific to certain cultures, stimuli, or contexts. What makes them interesting is that they defy formal logic.
