Who says “larger” and who says “smaller”? Individual differences in the language of comparison

Abstract

When comparing a pair of attribute values, English speakers can use a “larger” comparative (“A is larger/longer/higher/more than B”) or a “smaller” comparative (“B is smaller/shorter/lower/less than A”). This choice matters because it affects people’s inferences about the absolute magnitudes of the compared items, and influences the perceived truthfulness of the comparative sentence itself. In 4 studies (total N = 2335), we investigated the language that people use to describe ordinal relations between attributes. Specifically, we examined whether demography, emotion, and personality predict the tendency to use “larger” comparatives rather than “smaller” ones. Participants viewed pairs of items differing in a single attribute and indicated the word they would use to describe the relationship between them; they also completed a series of self-report measures. Replicating previous work, we found a robust tendency to use “larger” comparatives, both when people chose between two adjectives and when they freely produced their own words in a sentence completion task. We also found that this tendency was more pronounced in older participants, those with positive mood or outlook, and among people high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. However, these effects were very small, with meta-analytic effect sizes indicating they explain less than 1% of the variance. We conclude that, although people’s use of comparative adjectives is influenced by properties of the items that are being compared, the way that people describe magnitude relations is relatively stable across variation in a range of important traits and dispositions, protecting decision-makers from a potentially undesirable source of bias in their inferences and representations of described options.

Dimensions of uncertainty communication: What is conveyed by verbal terms and numeric ranges

“…They lead to more agreement and will more likely be considered true (Hoorens & Bruckmüller, 2015;Zhang & Schwarz, 2020). This asymmetry may reflect an even more general preference for comparing objects in terms of which is larger, higher, stronger, wider, and fuller instead of smaller, lower, weaker, narrower, and emptier (Matthews & Dylman, 2014;Skylark et al, 2018). This "Higher Use of Larger Comparison (HULC)"-effect may in turn be related to the concept of linguistic markedness, which implies a tendency to name dimensions after the upper, "unmarked" end of the dimension (Battistella, 1996;Clark & Clark, 1977).…”

More is easier? Testing the role of fluency in the more-credible effect

“…In language production tasks, people indeed seem to favour "larger" comparatives (Hoorens & Bruckmüller, 2015; see also ) --a so-called higher use of larger comparatives (HULC) effect (Matthews & Dylman, 2014). However, the choice is not arbitrary: whether people use the "smaller" or "larger" comparative to describe a given pair of items depends, inter alia, on the spatial and temporal layout of the objects and on their absolute magnitudes (Matthews & Dylman, 2014;Skylark, 2018); there is also indication that people who are older and those who are more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable are more likely to use "larger" comparatives, although these effects are small (Skylark et al, 2018).…”