This paper reports on an experimental investigation into the perception of fairness in taxation. 219 subjects rated their own tax burdens, stated their preferred type of tax scale, and proposed fair tax burdens for a number of reference households. While the former two tasks involved qualitative ratings, the latter one required quantitative ratings, that is, the respondents were forced to express their judgments on different types of response scales. Contrasting the subjects' qualitative ratings with their quantitative ratings, we found major inconsistencies. We conclude from this that the task context (for example, the basic political attitude) becomes more prominent in qualitative ratings while individual factors of perception, such as anchor points, become more prominent in quantitative ratings.