ASKING COMPARATIVE QUESTIONS - THE IMPACT OF THE DIRECTION OF COMPARISON

Questions assessing comparative judgments are often phrased as directe d comparisons, that is, a stimulus A (subject) is to be compared to a stimulus B (referent); for example, ''Is tennis more exciting than soc cer or less exciting?'' Tversky's work on judgment of similarity indic ated that comparing A to B may result in different similarity judgment s than comparing B to A, The four studies reported in this article ext end this work from judgments of similarity to evaluative judgments in general. The results demonstrate that the direction of comparison elic ited by the wording of the question can have a strong impact on the ob tained results. In some instances, a reversal in the direction of comp arison (i.e., comparing A to B vs. B to A) resulted in a reversal of t he ordinal ranking. Implications for question wording are discussed.