The common saying "It's like comparing apples and oranges" is used to denote an inappropriate comparison. If you consider to
Buy essays, you should know that
buy essay papers online you risk getting a zero grade due to plagiarism. What is interesting about this saying is that apples and oranges, rather than, let's say, apples and baskets, became idiomatic with a poor comparison. Wouldn't apples and baskets, which obviously have less commonalities than apples and oranges, serve as a better example of a poor comparison? The answer to this question is that apples and baskets cannot exemplify a poor comparison because they do not exemplify a comparison. Rather, they exemplify a functional (thematic) relation between two entities. This answer emerges from a set of studies in which my colleagues and I found that, irrespective of task instructions, people tend to compare certain stimuli (e.g., apples and oranges) but tend to integrate other stimuli (e.g., apples and baskets). As a result, when people are faced with stimili that do not fit the task requirements (e.g., asked to judge similarity between apples and baskets), they tend to replace a task-appropriate process (comparison) with a stimuli-appropriate process (integration) -- performance to which I refer here as processing replacements.
Theoretical accounts of similarity seem to hold that the process of comparison is a general-purpose mechanism that can be applied to any arbitrary pair of stimuli (e.g., both apples and baskets and apples and oranges). Most probably, researchers who study similarity or analogical reasoning did not notice that people may integrate rather than compare certain stimuli because, much like their subjects, they typically select comparison-appropriate stimuli. Of course, unintentionally, they may sometimes select stimuli that people tend to integrate rather than compare. However, being unaware of processing replacements, they would try to explain performance that was mediated by integration (e.g., baskets contain apples) in terms of the hypothesized process of feature comparison (e.g., both baskets and apples are objects found in orchards).
