Experimental analysis of reporting about the high frequency of an event

Questionnaires are common tools in psychological studies, and they include questions about frequencies (e.g., State-Trait Anxiety Inventory asks how often do you feel nervous with response options ‘never’, ‘sometimes’, ‘often’ and ‘very often’), but the meaning of responses is not clear. B. F. Skinner proposed an experimental analysis as a way to find the meaning of verbal behavior. The term ‘often’ was defined functionally as behavior with positive sensitivity to the relative frequency of an event and sensitivity to the question and social consequences. The matching law was used to describe context-behavior relations quantitatively. We conducted four experiments on ten Russian native speakers to determine the meaning of the term ‘often’. During each experiment inducers (alternating events ‘1’ and ‘0’ with a predetermined probability of occurrence, the question about the relative frequency of one of the events ‘Do you often see ‘1’s?’) and response options (‘Yes’ and ‘No’) were constantly presented. We documented free operant responses over the sequences of events with different lengths (from 4 to 12 events) and prior odds of ‘1’s to ‘0’s (from 1:5 to 5:1). Collected data suggests that ‘often’ means ‘at least three times in a row’.