Contrast Effects and Subtraction in Part-Whole Questions

Responses to a question about the state economy changed when the question followed a similar item about the economy of the respondent's local community. The overall distribution of the answers changed, as well as the correlation between the two items. Prior work has suggested that respondents may exclude specific aspects of a general issue from consideration when a question about the general issue follows a question about the specific aspect of it. Responses to an open-ended item indicate that respondents may have excluded a salient characteristic of the community economy when subsequently assessing the state economy, even though this characteristic figured prominently when respondents evaluated the state economy first.