The Overlooking of Subtractive Changes: Replication and Extension to Stronger Cues and Social Norms

Abstract

People systematically overlook subtractive changes and favor additive ones when reporting new ideas. In a first preregistered experiment conducted via the Prolific platform among French adults (N = 477), we replicated experiments 2, 3, and 4 in Adams et al.'s study. We replicated the overlooking of subtraction, as participants reported 1155 additive ideas and only 297 subtractive ideas. Cueing participants (“Remember that you can add things or take them away”) increased the percentage of participants who reported at least one subtractive idea (overall OR = 2.52, improvement condition, ϕ = 0.18, make it worse condition, ϕ = 0.24). In a second experiment conducted to test how the framing of the cue influences the overlook, participants reported more subtractive ideas when they read a subtract-only cue (“remember that you can take things away”), than with a subtract-then-add cue. Results therefore provided empirical support for the overlooking of subtractive changes hypothesis, mitigated by a cue. We also found that norms affected the report of new ideas (descriptive OR = 7.49, injunctive OR = 6.86). Cues and injunctive (but not descriptive) norms were both related to the asymmetry.