ITOR_2023In the online-first access of the journal "International Transactions in Operational Research" (ITOR), a new article by the N.EA. team has just been released. The article serves as an extended report on research conducted by Professor Ewa Roszkowska and Tomasz Wachowicz regarding reducing cognitive burdens on decision-makers in decision-analysis processes and defining preferences to be used in formal decision-support methods. The study explores the possibility of replacing, at times numerous and exhaustive, pairwise comparisons (present, for example, in the well-known AHP method) with simple linguistic declarations on a predefined seven-point scale. The results of the experiments strongly suggest that the approach based on linguistic declarations tends to incur certain errors and heuristics, preventing decision-makers from reflecting their preferences as precisely as in AHP. The main reason for this lies in the central tendency heuristic, which causes decision-makers to be reluctant to use extreme ratings on the scale. The article is directly accessible on the publisher's website through the following link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.13339.