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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
Published on: March 1, 2022
Interpersonal comparison of subjective probabilities: toward translating linguistic probabilities
Mandeep K Dhami1, Thomas S Wallsten
1University of Cambridge, Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, England. mkd25@cam.ac.uk
Abstract:
Interpersonal variability in understanding linguistic probabilities can adversely affect decision making. Using the fact that everyone judges canonical probability events similarly in a manner consistent with axiom systems that yield a probability measure, we developed and tested a method for comparing the meanings of probability phrases across individuals. An experiment demonstrated that despite extreme heterogeneity in participants' linguistic probability lexicons, interpersonal similarity in phrase meaning is well predicted by phrase rank order within the lexicons. Thus, equally ranked phrases have similar meanings, and individual differences in linguistic probabilities may simply be explained by the phrases people use at each rank.
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