Difficult. The “distance” is metaphorical, and this probably doesn’t apply when there’s an easy, unambiguous, generally accepted metric. Without that, how do we do the study?
Still, if you have a way, it could be interesting.
In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
On the other hand, the book doesn’t give a citation, and searching for the exact text of the question turns up only that passage. Not sure what to make of that.
In the study, the spouses actually estimated their contributions by making a slash mark on a line segment which had endpoints labelled “primarily wife” and “primarily husband”. The experimenters set it up this way, rather than asking for numerical percentages, for ethical reasons. In pilot testing using percentages, they “found that subjects were able to remember the percentages they recorded and that postquestionnaire comparisons of percentages provided a strong source of conflict between the spouses.” (p. 325)
If there is no easy, unambiguous generally accepted metric, that would seem to imply that everyone is a poor judge of distance—making the quote trivially true.
This could be studied empirically.
Difficult. The “distance” is metaphorical, and this probably doesn’t apply when there’s an easy, unambiguous, generally accepted metric. Without that, how do we do the study?
Still, if you have a way, it could be interesting.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
On the other hand, the book doesn’t give a citation, and searching for the exact text of the question turns up only that passage. Not sure what to make of that.
Ross & Sicoly (1979). Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution.
In the study, the spouses actually estimated their contributions by making a slash mark on a line segment which had endpoints labelled “primarily wife” and “primarily husband”. The experimenters set it up this way, rather than asking for numerical percentages, for ethical reasons. In pilot testing using percentages, they “found that subjects were able to remember the percentages they recorded and that postquestionnaire comparisons of percentages provided a strong source of conflict between the spouses.” (p. 325)
If there is no easy, unambiguous generally accepted metric, that would seem to imply that everyone is a poor judge of distance—making the quote trivially true.