Worse is bad: Divergent inferences from logically equivalent comparisons.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Comparisons can often be framed in different but equivalent ways. For example, "A is better than B," can also be expressed as "B is worse than A." In 7 studies (and 4 further studies in the Supplemental Materials available in the OSF) we find that logically equivalent comparison frames have divergent effects on judgments and choices for the items being compared as well as other members of the set from which those items were drawn. These effects are asymmetric, affecting inferior items more strongly than superior ones. We propose a "comparison framing" account that draws on theory in linguistics on the markedness of adjectives (Cruse, 1976; Lehrer, 1985) to explain these results. We show that this account fits the data better than 2 previous accounts of attribute framing: automatic valenced associations (Levin et al., 1998) and leakage of information (McKenzie & Nelson, 2003). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".