Overstatement in happiness reporting with ordinal, bounded scale.

ABSTRACT: There are various methods by which people can express subjective evaluations quantitatively. For example, happiness can be measured on a scale from 1 to 10, and has been suggested as a measure of economic policy. However, there is resistance to these types of measurement from economists, who often regard welfare to be a cardinal, unbounded quantity. It is unclear whether there are differences between subjective evaluation reported on ordinal, bounded scales and on cardinal, unbounded scales. To answer this question, we developed functional magnetic resonance imaging experimental tasks for reporting happiness from monetary gain and the perception of visual stimulus. Subjects tended to report higher values when they used ordinal scales instead of cardinal scales. There were differences in ne

SUBMITTER: Tanaka SC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4758068 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature