One of the main ideas that has emerged from behavioral decision research is a constructive conception of judgment and choice. According to this view, preferences and beliefs are actually constructed – not merely revealed – in the elicitation process. This conception is entailed by findings that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation often give rise to systematically different responses (e.g., Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 1982; Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988). To account for these data within a constructive framework, we seek explanatory principles that relate the characteristics of the task to the attributes of the objects under study. One such notion is the compatibility hypothesis, which states that the weight of a stimulus attribute is enhanced by its compatibility with the response.

The rationale for this hypothesis is twofold. First, noncompatibility between the input and the output requires additional mental operations, which often increase effort and error and may reduce impact. Second, a response mode may prime or focus attention on the compatible features of the stimulus. Common features, for example, are weighted more heavily in judgments of similarity than in judgments of dissimilarity, whereas distinctive features are weighted more heavily in judgments of dissimilarity (Tversky, 1977). Consequently, entities with many common and many distinctive features (e.g., East and West Germany) are judged as both more similar to each other and as more different from each other than entities with relatively fewer common and fewer distinctive features (e.g., Sri Lanka and Nepal).