Contextual effects in salary satisfaction

Abstract This article reports a series of studies of judgments of satisfaction with salary, manipulating the distribution of salaries of others doing the same work. The experiments were designed to compare 6 theories of contextual effects in judgment, including adaptation-level theory, correlation–regression theory, inferred distribution (ID) theory, decision by sampling (DbS), ensemble (EN) theory, and range–frequency (RF) theory. Manipulations of the frequency distribution using cubic density functions produce a double crossover of curves relating judgments to salaries; this double crossover violates implications of 4 of the theories but remains consistent with DbS and RF theories. ID theory assumes that rank is inferred from the mean and endpoints, so it fails to describe the double crossover. Manipulations of the endpoints produce changes in the heights and slopes of the curves, which are not explained by DbS and are partially inconsistent with EN theory. EN theory implies no effect of the rank of a salary and assumes that endpoints only affect judgments of salaries on the same side of the mean, contrary to the results. RF theory implies that ratings of stimuli holding the same ranks in 2 contexts with differing endpoints should be linearly related, and the data appeared consistent with this implication. RF theory is the only theory that gives a consistent account of all of the results. RF theory can be extended in order to estimate the effective context, which appears to differ systematically between people according to their full-time incomes.