Additivity dominance: Additivites are more potent and more often lexicalized across languages than are “subtractives”
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2009, Vol 4, Issue 6
Abstract
Judgments of naturalness of foods tend to be more influenced by the process history of a food, rather than its actual constituents. Two types of processing of a “natural” food are to add something or to remove something. We report in this study, based on a large random sample of individuals from six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, UK and USA) that additives are considered defining features of what makes a food not natural, whereas “subtractives” are almost never mentioned. In support of this, skim milk (with major subtraction of fat) is rated as more natural than whole milk with a small amount of natural vitamin D added. It is also noted that “additives” is a common word, with a synonym reported by a native speaker in 17 of 18 languages, whereas “subtractive” is lexicalized in only 1 of the 18 languages. We consider reasons for additivity dominance, relating it to omission bias, feature positive bias, and notions of purity.
Authors and Affiliations
Paul Rozin, Claude Fischler, and Christy Shields-Argelès
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677703
- DOI -
- Views 172
- Downloads 0
Using the ACT-R architecture to specify 39 quantitative process models of decision making
Hypotheses about decision processes are often formulated qualitatively and remain silent about the interplay of decision, memorial, and other cognitive processes. At the same time, existing decision models are specified...
Observing others’ behavior and risk taking in decisions from experience
This paper examines how observing other people’s behavior affects risk taking in repeated decision tasks. In Study 1, 100 participants performed experience-based decision tasks either alone or in pairs, with the two memb...
Deception and price in a market with asymmetric information
In markets with asymmetric information, only sellers have knowledge about the quality of goods. Sellers may of course make a declaration of the quality, but unless there are sanctions imposed on false declarations or rep...
Preference for increasing wages: How do people value various streams of income?
Prior studies have found that subjects prefer an improving sequence of income over a constant sequence, even if the constant sequence offers a larger present-discounted value. However, little is known about how these pre...
Facing expectations: Those that we prefer to fulfil and those that we disregard.
We argue that people choosing prosocial distribution of goods (e.g., in dictator games) make this choice because they do not want to disappoint their partner rather than because of a direct preference for the chosen pros...