The rank principle in social and cognitive comparison: experimental data

Brown, Gordon (2017). The rank principle in social and cognitive comparison: experimental data. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-851345

How satisfied are we with our wages? Do British citizens pay more or less tax than they should? Does the UK take in more than its fair share of asylum seekers? People's answers to such questions are typically, highly relative.

Wages are judged with reference to those of similar others in the same workplace or neighbourhood; many UK citizens believe that the UK takes too many asylum seekers in comparison to other countries. Thus judgements and decisions may be strongly determined by inaccurate prior beliefs or by a context of available information. For example, opinions about levels of immigration or taxation may be strongly Influenced by people's (often inaccurate) beliefs about levels in other European countries.

The research is developing and testing a rank-based model of everyday judgement and decision-making. Attitudes are hypothesised to be influenced by the rank-ordered position of an option in a distiibution. For example, most people overestimate the number of very wealthy people in the UK. We find that individuals' life satisfaction is influenced by where they believe themselves to rank in this assumed wage distribution, rather than by their actual wage. The project applies rank-based models to judgements about various socially and politically important quantities.

Data description (abstract)

Data collected in a series of laboratory experiments examining context effects on judgment and decision-making. Experiments tested the idea that people's answers to everyday questions such as whether they are exercising enough, whether they are satisfied with their educational experience, whether they are drinking too much, or what constitutes an appropriate prison sentence, are influenced by their (often inaccurate) beliefs about the context of comparison.

Data creators: