Deliberate
When Budgeting Backfires: How Self-Imposed Price Restraints Can Increase Spending
Jeffrey Larson & Ryan Hamilton
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
A common strategy for controlling spending is to impose a price restraint on oneself. For example, a consumer who is concerned with limiting expenses may decide before going shopping that he or she only wants to spend approximately $100 for a particular purchase. Although conventional wisdom predicts that self-imposed price restraints will decrease consumer spending, the authors show that salient price restraints can actually increase consumers' preferences for high-priced, high-quality items. The authors propose that making a price restraint salient has the effect of partitioning consumers' evaluations of price and quality, leading to larger differences in perceived quality between options and a greater focus on quality during the final decision. Thus, while budgets and other types of price restraints can limit spending by eliminating some high-priced options from consideration, this research suggests that they can also have the ironic effect of increasing consumers' spending relative to a situation in which consumers have not imposed a price restraint.
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Kurt Gray
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The experience of physical stimuli would seem to depend primarily on their physical characteristics - chocolate tastes good, getting slapped hurts, and snuggling is pleasurable. This research examined, however, whether physical experience is influenced by the interpersonal context in which stimuli occur. Specifically, three studies examined whether perceiving benevolent intentions behind stimuli can improve their experience. Experiment 1 tested whether benevolently intended shocks hurt less, Experiment 2 tested whether benevolently intended massages were more pleasurable, and Experiment 3 tested whether benevolently intended candy tastes sweeter. The results confirm that good intentions - even misguided ones - can sooth pain, increase pleasure, and make things taste better. More broadly, these studies suggest that basic physical experience depends upon how we perceive the minds of others.
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Benefiting From Misfortune: When Harmless Actions Are Judged to Be Morally Blameworthy
Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro & Fiery Cushman
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, January 2012, Pages 52-62
Abstract:
Dominant theories of moral blame require an individual to have caused or intended harm. However, the current four studies demonstrate cases where no harm is caused or intended, yet individuals are nonetheless deemed worthy of blame. Specifically, individuals are judged to be blameworthy when they engage in actions that enable them to benefit from another's misfortune (e.g., betting that a company's stock will decline or that a natural disaster will occur). Evidence is presented suggesting that perceptions of the actor's wicked desires are responsible for this phenomenon. It is argued that these results are consistent with a growing literature demonstrating that moral judgments are often the product of evaluations of character in addition to evaluations of acts.
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The psychosemantics of free riding: Dissecting the architecture of a moral concept
Andrew Delton et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
For collective action to evolve and be maintained by selection, the mind must be equipped with mechanisms designed to identify free riders-individuals who do not contribute to a collective project but still benefit from it. Once identified, free riders must be either punished or excluded from future collective actions. But what criteria does the mind use to categorize someone as a free rider? An evolutionary analysis suggests that failure to contribute is not sufficient. Failure to contribute can occur by intention or accident, but the adaptive threat is posed by those who are motivated to benefit themselves at the expense of cooperators. In 6 experiments, we show that only individuals with exploitive intentions were categorized as free riders, even when holding their actual level of contribution constant (Studies 1 and 2). In contrast to an evolutionary model, rational choice and reinforcement theory suggest that different contribution levels (leading to different payoffs for their cooperative partners) should be key. When intentions were held constant, however, differences in contribution level were not used to categorize individuals as free riders, although some categorization occurred along a competence dimension (Study 3). Free rider categorization was not due to general tendencies to categorize (Study 4) or to mechanisms that track a broader class of intentional moral violations (Studies 5A and 5B). The results reveal the operation of an evolved concept with features tailored for solving the collective action problems faced by ancestral hunter-gatherers.
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Psychological Distance and Subjective Experience: How Distancing Reduces the Feeling of Difficulty
Manoj Thomas & Claire Tsai
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychological distance can reduce the subjective experience of difficulty caused by task complexity and task anxiety. Four experiments were conducted to test several related hypotheses. Psychological distance was altered by activating a construal mind-set and by varying bodily distance from a given task. Activating an abstract mind-set reduced the feeling of difficulty. A direct manipulation of distance from the task produced the same effect: participants found the task to be less difficult when they distanced themselves from the task by leaning back in their seats. The experiments not only identify psychological distance as a hitherto unexplored but ubiquitous determinant of task difficulty but also identify bodily distance as an antecedent of psychological distance.
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Stepping Back While Staying Engaged: When Facing an Obstacle Increases Psychological Distance
Janina Marguc, Gerben Van Kleef & Jens Förster
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
When do people respond to obstacles by mentally "stepping back" and taking a more distanced perspective? Manipulating obstacles to social goals, to personal goals, and in a computer game, three studies tested the hypothesis that people should increase psychological distance upon facing an obstacle primarily when distancing is relevant, that is, when the obstacle appears on their own path to a goal or when they are engaged and motivated to follow through with activities. As expected, participants who imagined a goal-relevant versus a goal-irrelevant obstacle indicated greater estimates for an unrelated spatial distance (Study 1). Moreover, chronically engaged participants provided smaller font size estimates after thinking about how to reach a personal goal with versus without an obstacle (Study 2), and participants primed with engagement indicated greater estimates for an unrelated spatial distance after navigating a maze with versus without an obstacle (Study 3). Implications for related research are discussed.
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The price of your soul: Neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values
Gregory Berns et al.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 5 March 2012, Pages 754-762
Abstract:
Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.
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Rationality and Emotionality: Serotonin Transporter Genotype Influences Reasoning Bias
Melanie Stollstorff et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reasoning often occurs under emotionally charged, opinion-laden circumstances. The belief-bias effect indexes the extent to which reasoning is based upon beliefs rather than logical structure. We examined whether emotional content increases this effect, particularly for adults genetically predisposed to be more emotionally reactive. SS/SLG carriers of the serotonin transporter genotype (5-HTTLPR) were less accurate selectively for evaluating emotional relational reasoning problems with belief-logic conflict relative to LALA carriers. Trait anxiety was positively associated with emotional belief-bias and the 5-HTTLPR genotype significantly accounted for the variance in this association. Thus, deductive reasoning, a higher cognitive ability, is sensitive to differences in emotionality rooted in serotonin neurotransmitter function.
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The effects of mortality salience on escalation of commitment
Chih-Long Yen & Chun-Yu Lin
International Journal of Psychology, January/February 2012, Pages 51-57
Abstract:
Based on propositions derived from terror management theory (TMT), the current study proposes that people who are reminded of their mortality exhibit a higher degree of self-justification behavior to maintain their self-esteem. For this reason, they could be expected to stick with their previous decisions and invest an increasing amount of resources in those decisions, despite the fact that negative feedback has clearly indicated that they might be on a course toward failure (i.e., "escalation of commitment"). Our experiment showed that people who were reminded of their mortality were more likely to escalate their level of commitment by maintaining their current course of action. Two imaginary scenarios were tested. One of the scenarios involved deciding whether to send additional troops into the battlefield when previous attempts had failed; the other involved deciding whether to continue developing an anti-radar fighter plane when the enemy had already developed a device to detect it. The results supported our hypothesis that mortality salience increases the tendency to escalate one's level of commitment.
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Decision Quicksand: How Trivial Choices Suck Us In
Aner Sela & Jonah Berger
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often get unnecessarily mired in trivial decisions. Four studies support a metacognitive account for this painful phenomenon. Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. People generally associate important decisions with difficulty. Consequently, if a decision feels unexpectedly difficult, due to even incidental reasons, people may draw the reverse inference that it is also important and consequently increase the amount of time and effort they expend. Ironically, this process is particularly likely for decisions that initially seemed unimportant because people expect them to be easier (whereas important decisions are expected to be difficult to begin with). Our studies demonstrate that unexpected difficulty not only causes people to get caught up in unimportant decisions but also to voluntarily seek more options, which can increase decision difficulty even further.
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Considering the situation: Why people are better social psychologists than self-psychologists
Emily Balcetis & David Dunning
Self and Identity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are people better self- or social psychologists when they predict prosocial behavior? Why might people be more or less accurate when predicting their own and others' actions? In two studies, participants considered variants of situations classically known to influence helping behavior (being alone vs. in a group, being in a good rather than bad mood). Participants made predictions about how they and their peers would act. Their predictions revealed that participants incorporated situational variations into social predictions, yet failed to do so when making self-predictions. These errors in self-prediction were not generated by response scale-type. This evidence suggests that people more appropriately use their knowledge of situational pressures when engaging in social rather than self-predictions.
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The Least Likely Act: Overweighting Atypical Past Behavior in Behavioral Predictions
Carey Morewedge & Alexander Todorov
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
When people predict the future behavior of a person, thinking of that target as an individual decreases the accuracy of their predictions. The present research examined one potential source of this bias, whether and why predictors overweight the atypical past behavior of individuals. The results suggest that predictors do indeed overweight the atypical past behavior of an individual. Atypical past behavior is more cognitively accessible than typical past behavior, which leads it to be overweighted in the impressions that serve as the basis for their predictions. Predictions for group members appear less susceptible to this bias, presumably because predictors are less likely to form a coherent impression of a group than an individual before making their predictions.
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Gigerenzer's Evolutionary Arguments against Rational Choice Theory: An Assessment
Armin Schulz
Philosophy of Science, December 2011, Pages 1272-1282
Abstract:
I critically discuss a recent innovation in the debate surrounding the plausibility of rational choice theory (RCT): the appeal to evolutionary theory. Specifically, I assess Gigerenzer and colleagues' claim that considerations based on natural selection show that, instead of making decisions in a RCT-like way, we rely on ‘simple heuristics'. As I try to make clearer here, though, Gigerenzer and colleagues' arguments are unconvincing: we lack the needed information about our past to determine whether the premises on which they are built are true - and, hence, we cannot tell whether they, in fact, speak against RCT.
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Triggering Self-Presentation Efforts Outside of People's Conscious Awareness
James Tyler
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three studies utilized priming techniques to examine whether self-presentations can be activated without conscious awareness. The results across all experiments consistently demonstrated nonconscious self-presentation effects, in that people were unaware that their self-presentations were triggered automatically and that their self-presentations were comparable to participants who were explicitly instructed to self-present. The findings are novel because they are the first to demonstrate that self-presentations can be triggered without conscious awareness in a manner similar to self-presentations that are strategically selected. In addition, the results help undermine the common misconception that self-presentation typically involves conscious deliberation, pretense, or outright deception.
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Distraction and Placebo: Two Separate Routes to Pain Control
Jason Buhle et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
An explosion of recent research has studied whether placebo treatments influence health-related outcomes and their biological markers, but almost no research has examined the psychological processes required for placebo effects to occur. This study tested whether placebo treatment and cognitive distraction reduce pain through shared or independent processes. We tested the joint effects of performance of an executive working memory task and placebo treatment on thermal pain perception. An interactive effect of these two manipulations would constitute evidence for shared mechanisms, whereas additive effects would imply separate mechanisms. Participants (N = 33) reported reduced pain both when they performed the working memory task and when they received the placebo treatment, but the reductions were additive, a result indicating that the executive demands of the working memory task did not interfere with placebo analgesia. Furthermore, placebo analgesia did not impair task performance. Together, these data suggest that placebo analgesia does not depend on active redirection of attention and that expectancy and distraction can be combined to maximize pain relief.
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Times flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity
James Woehrle & Joseph Magliano
Acta Psychologica, February 2012, Pages 314-319
Abstract:
Attention affects the perception of time, and the ability to control attention is reflected in measures of working-memory capacity. Individuals with low working memory capacity have more difficulty maintaining focus on a task than high-capacity individuals, particularly when faced with contextual distracters. This experiment examined the effect of working-memory capacity on the perception of temporal duration while performing a cognitive task. We predicted that low-capacity participants would be more likely to direct attention away from the cognitive task and towards the contextual distraction of time, and consequently perceive temporal duration more accurately, and perform the cognitive task less accurately, than high-capacity participants. The results showed that when performing both tasks simultaneously, low-capacity participants were less accurate than high-capacity participants on the cognitive task, but were more accurate on the timing task. High-capacity participants, conversely, were more accurate in the non-temporal cognitive task at the cost of monitoring duration.