| Summary: | People are more likely to endorse statements of the form "A is
more than B" than those of the form "B is less than A", even though the ordinal
relationship being described is identical in both cases – a result I dub the
"more-credible" effect. This paper reports 9 experiments (total N = 5643) that
probe the generality and basis for this effect. Studies 1-4 replicate the
effect for comparative statements relating to environmental change and
sustainable behaviours, finding that it is robust to changes in participant
population, experimental design, response formats and data analysis strategy.
However, it does not generalize to all stimulus sets. Studies 5--9 test the
proposition that the effect is based on the greater ease of processing "more
than" statements. I find no meaningful effect of warning people not to base
their judgments on the fluency of the sentences (Studies 5 and 6), but do find
associations between comparative language, credibility, and processing time:
when the more-credible effect manifests, the more-than statements are read more
quickly than the less-than statements, and this difference partly mediates the
effect of comparative on agreement with the statements; in contrast, for a set
of comparisons for which changes in the more/less framing did not affect truth
judgments, there was no meaningful difference in the time taken to read the
more- and less-than versions of the statements. Taken together, these results
highlight the importance of comparative language in shaping the credibility of
important socio-political messages, and provide some limited support for the
idea that the effect of language choice is partly due to differences in how
easily the statements can be processed – although other mechanisms are also
likely to be at work.
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