Why Are Negative Questions Difficult to Answer? On the Processing of Linguistic Contrasts in Surveys

Abstract

Previous studies show that respondents are generally more likely to disagree with negative survey questions (e.g., This is a bad book. Yes/No) than to agree with positive ones (e.g., This a good book. Yes/No). In the current research, we related this effect to the cognitive processes underlying question answering. Using eye-tracking, we show that during the initial reading of the question, negative evaluative terms (e.g., bad) require more processing time than their positive counterparts (e.g., good). In addition to these small differences in the initial stages of question answering, large processing differences occur later in the question answering process: Negative questions are reread longer and more often than their positive counterparts. This is particularly true when respondents answer no rather than yes to negative questions. Hence, wording effects for contrastive questions probably occur because response categories such as Yes and No do not carry an absolute meaning, but are given meaning relative to the evaluative term in the question (e.g., good/bad). As answering no to negative questions requires more processing effort in particular, a likely explanation for the occurrence of the wording effect is that no answers to a negative question convey a mitigated meaning. The activation of this additional pragmatic meaning causes additional processing effort and also causes respondents to pick a no answer to negative questions relatively easily.