Paired preference tests and placebo placement: 2. Unraveling the effects of stimulus variance.

From the literature on paired preference testing, there has been disagreement regarding whether a placebo pair would have a significantly higher frequency of 'no preference' responses if it were to be placed for assessment after its corresponding target pair rather than before. This can be important, because the higher the frequency of 'no preference' responses in the placebo pair, the more powerful will be any chi-squared related analysis, which determines whether the target pair indicates a significant preference or not. In the first paper in this series, it was shown, that indeed a placebo placed after the target pair induced a higher proportion of consumers to respond with a 'no preference'. However, the response was uneven. For some stimuli, the response was strong and significant, for others it was weaker and not significant. It was hypothesized that the weak response could be due to greater variance among the individual stimuli in the placebo sample to be tasted. The effect was confirmed using a priori chosen high and low variance stimuli. Further evidence was obtained from predictions for preference tau criterion levels and frequency of preference changes between two target pairs. All these indicated that the weaker response of some stimuli was due to a higher level of variance among the individual stimuli.