The El Greco Fallacy, this Time with Feeling: How (not) to Measure Group Differences in Emotional Intensity

We all get angry. And some of us get angrier than others. But are such differences systematic across groups? Affective scientists often make claims about group differences in emotional intensity by comparing group averages on labeled (e.g. Likert) scales. For example, prominent research has used such scales to claim, perhaps counterintuitively, that women experience anger more intensely than men. Despite their ubiquity, these measures are susceptible to a subtle but notorious problem: the El Greco fallacy. (El Greco famously painted elongated figures. Could this be because he experienced a stretched-out world, due to a type of astigmatism? No, since then he would also have experienced a stretched-out canvas, and the effects would necessarily cancel out.) Here, across four experiments, we replicate the apparent finding with labeled scales that women experience anger more intensely than men. But we then go on to show that this finding reliably disappears when tested with a general Labeled Magnitude Scale (gLMS) - a psychophysical measure designed to detect such differences, avoiding the El Greco fallacy. This demonstrates how insights from sensory psychophysics can be usefully employed in affective science, and supports skepticism about purported group differences in emotional intensity based on labeled scales. The deep lesson for psychological measurement: the most obvious tools are not always the best.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-025-00314-z.