Universität zu Köln

Striewe, Victoria (2022). The Sequence of Standard and Target in Pairwise Magnitude Comparisons. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

The present research introduces the effect of the presentation order of target and standard in paired magnitude comparisons on comparison performance. So far, this effect has been overlooked by most of the domains of psychological research on comparative thinking. The standard-target-sequence-effect (STSE) was demonstrated in eight out of eleven experiments (N = 1,018) presented in the work at hand. Participants repetitively performed simple magnitude comparisons of two objects (e.g. one digit numbers or geometric shapes) in various economic and social contexts. Results revealed a stable performance advantage (in terms of speed and accuracy) for trials in which the standard stimulus was encountered before the to be judged target stimulus. In three experiments the STSE could not be observed, most likely because of the relative spatial and temporal positions of stimuli. The diverse findings and experimental set ups are discussed as well as the underlying mechanism, the interaction of the STSE with the SNARC effect for numerical comparisons (Dehaene, Dupoux & Mehler, 1990; Dehaene, Bossini & Giraux, 1993; Fisher, Castel, Dodd & Pratt, 2003) and the ascending order advantage in magnitude judgement tasks (Turconi, Campbell & Seron, 2006; Müller & Schwarz, 2008; Schroeder, Nuerk & Plewnia, 2017). The effect of the order of target and standard on comparison processes had been mentioned in signal detection and stimuli discrimination tasks in psychophysics (so called Type B Effect, e.g. Dijas & Ulrich, 2014), while social and cognitive psychologists’ research on judgements of similarity and contrast have provided inconsistent results for the influence of the sequence of standard and target on the comparison process (e.g. Tversky, 1978; Agostinelli, Sherman, Fazio & Hearst, 1986). Researchers on symbolic pairwise comparisons did not report such an effect at all. The research on the STSE outlined in the work at hand contributes to an interdisciplinary understanding of order effects of target and standard as well as to the debate on the origins of order effects in general and on the basic principles of comparative thinking.