Beliefs about control over gambling among young people, and their relation to problem gambling.

The aim of this study was to assess the association between beliefs about 2 types of control—(a) illusion of control and (b) internal locus of control—and gambling frequency–problem gambling among young people age 14 to 25 years (435 males, 577 females, and 5 unreported gender). A revised version of the South Oaks Gambling Screen and measures of gambling frequency and gambling beliefs were administered. Results indicated that irrational control beliefs were strongly associated with problem gambling. Young problem gamblers were more likely to believe that they needed money and that gambling would provide it. In addition, young problem gamblers had more faith in their ability to manipulate chance and "beat the system." Regression models with illusion of control and internal control over gambling significantly predicted gambling frequency and problem gambling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Focalism: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting.

The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1–3, college football fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football game would influence their happiness if they first thought about how much time they would spend on other future activities. Studies 4 and 5 ruled out alternative explanations and found evidence for a distraction interpretation, that people who think about future events moderate their forecasts because they believe that these events will reduce thinking about the focal event. The authors discuss the implications of focalism for other literatures, such as the planning fallacy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Temporal differences in trait self-ascription: When the self is seen as an other.

Seven studies exploring people's tendency to make observer-like attributions about their past and future selves are presented. Studies 1 and 2 showed temporal differences in trait assessments that paralleled the classic actor-observer difference. Study 3 provided evidence against a motivational account of these differences. Studies 4-7 explored underlying mechanisms involving differences in the focus of attention of the sort linked to the classic actor-observer difference. In Study 4, people perceived past and future selves from a more observer-like perspective than present selves. In Studies 5 and 6, manipulating attention to internal states (vs. observable behavior) of past and future selves led people to ascribe fewer traits to those selves. Study 7 showed an inverse relationship for past and present selves between observer-like visual focus and salience of internal information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments.

Like the inhabitants of Garrison Keillor's (1985) fictional community of Lake Wobegon, most people appear to believe that their skills and abilities are above average. A series of studies illustrates one of the reasons why: When people compare themselves with their peers, they focus egocentrically on their own skills and insufficiently take into account the skills of the comparison group. This tendency engenders the oft-documented above-average effect in domains in which absolute skills tend to be high but produces a reliable below-average effect in domains in which absolute skills tend to be low (Studies 1 and 2). In Study 3, cognitive load exacerbated these biases, suggesting that people "anchor" on their assessment of their own abilities and insufficiently "adjust" to take into account the skills of the comparison group. These results suggest that the tendency to see oneself as above average may not be as ubiquitous as once thought. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance.

This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. In Study 3, participants in a group discussion overestimated how prominent their positive and negative utterances were to their fellow discussants. Studies 4 and 5 provide evidence supporting an anchoring-and-adjustment interpretation of the spotlight effect. In particular, people appear to anchor on their own rich phenomenological experience and then adjust insufficiently—to take into account the perspective of others. The discussion focuses on the manifestations and implications of the spotlight effect across a host of everyday social phenomena. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Further evidence for mixed emotions.

Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested several alternative interpretations for prior evidence that happiness and sadness can co-occur in bittersweet situations (i.e., those containing both pleasant and unpleasant aspects). One possibility is that subjects who reported mixed emotions merely vacillated between happiness and sadness. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 1–3 by asking subjects to complete online continuous measures of happiness and sadness. Subjects reported more simultaneously mixed emotions during a bittersweet film clip than during a control clip. Another possibility is that subjects in earlier studies reported mixed emotions only because they were explicitly asked whether they felt happy and sad. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 4–6 with open-ended measures of emotion. Subjects were more likely to report mixed emotions after the bittersweet clip than the control clip. Both patterns occurred even when subjects were told that they were not expected to report mixed emotions (Studies 2 and 5) and among subjects who did not previously believe that people could simultaneously feel happy and sad (Studies 3 and 6). These results provide further evidence that positivity and negativity are separable in experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Missing the trees for the forest: A construal level account of the illusion of explanatory depth.

An illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) occurs when people believe they understand a concept more deeply than they actually do. To date, IOEDs have been identified only in mechanical and natural domains, occluding why they occur and suggesting that their implications are quite limited. Six studies illustrated that IOEDs occur because people adopt an inappropriately abstract construal style when they assess how well they understand concrete concepts. As this mechanism predicts, participants who naturally adopted concrete construal styles (Study 1) or were induced to adopt a concrete construal style (Studies 2–4 and 6), experienced diminished IOEDs. Two additional studies documented a novel IOED in the social psychological domain of electoral voting (Studies 5 and 6), demonstrating the generality of the construal mechanism, the authors also extended the presumed boundary conditions of the effect beyond mechanical and natural domains. These findings suggest a novel factor that might contribute to such diverse social-cognitive shortcomings as stereotyping, egocentrism, and the planning fallacy, where people adopt abstract representations of concepts that should be represented concretely. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Causal focus and estimates of consensus: An examination of the false-consensus effect.

Examined one of the underlying mechanisms—people's causal attributions for their own behavior—of the "false-consensus effect" (the tendency to overestimate the commonness of one's own attitudes and behavior). It was hypothesized that when people view their responses as the result of external influences, they overestimate the commonness of those responses; when they see their behavior as stemming from their own personal characteristics or experiences, they make more unbiased estimates of consensus. Study 1 tested this notion by having 109 undergraduates make hypothetical behavioral choices and then manipulating their explanations for their choices. As predicted, Ss who were led to cite personal reasons for their choices made lower consensus estimates than Ss who either were led to cite situational reasons or were unconstrained in their explanations. This causal-focus manipulation also had significant effects on Ss' trait ratings of the kind of person who would choose each alternative. Study 2, with 20 undergraduates, extended these results by finding a significant correlation between the extent to which people perceive a false consensus for various issues and the extent to which those issues prompt situational explanations for one's responses. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The disparity between the actual and assumed power of self-interest.

Five studies examined the hypothesis that people overestimate the influence of self-interest on attitudes and behaviors. The results strongly supported the hypothesis. In Study 1, participants overestimated the impact that financial reward exerted on their peers' willingness to donate blood. In 4 subsequent studies, participants overestimated the impact that group membership had on their peers' attitudes (Studies 2, 3, and 4) and behaviors (Study 5). The tendency to overestimate the impact of self-interest on others was largely unrelated to the impact that it had on participants' own attitudes and behaviors. Implications of the lay person's belief in the power of self-interest are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferences About the Authentic Self: When Do Actions Say More Than Mental States?

Three studies involving 478 undergraduates examined the perceived importance of observable actions versus mental states in revealing the "true self"-the authentic and fundamental nature of a target person. Results suggest that when people have only limited information about a target, they believe that an action is more diagnostic of the individual's true self than the accompanying mental state. When participants have knowledge concerning chronic dispositional tendencies of the target, however, they judge that a chronic mental state is more diagnostic of the true self than a chronic action tendency. Considered together, the findings suggest that people conceptualize the true self as a relatively private entity but nevertheless believe that an action of a little-known person may be particularly informative about that individual. Perceived diagnosticity of the true self was partially mediated by inferences concerning the relative stability of actions versus states but not by inferences of volition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be.

How powerful is the status quo in determining people’s social ideals? The authors propose (a) that people engage in injunctification, that is, a motivated tendency to construe the current status quo as the most desirable and reasonable state of affairs (i.e., as the most representative of how things should be); (b) that this tendency is driven, at least in part, by people’s desire to justify their sociopolitical systems; and (c) that injunctification has profound implications for the maintenance of inequality and societal change. Four studies, across a variety of domains, provided supportive evidence. When the motivation to justify the sociopolitical system was experimentally heightened, participants injunctified extant (a) political power (Study 1), (b) public funding policies (Study 2), and (c) unequal gender demographics in the political and business spheres (Studies 3 and 4, respectively). It was also demonstrated that this motivated phenomenon increased derogation of those who act counter to the status quo (Study 4). Theoretical implications for system justification theory, stereotype formation, affirmative action, and the maintenance of inequality are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social judgeability: The impact of meta-informational cues on the use of stereotypes.

According to a social judgeability analysis, a crucial determinant of impression formation is the extent to which people feel entitled to judge a target person. Two experiments, with a total of 113 undergraduates, tested the impact of the subjective availability of individuating information on a social judgment independent of its actual presence. In Exp 1, Ss made a stereotypical judgment when they believed individuating information was present even if no information was in fact given. In Exp 2, Ss who thought they received individuating information made more extreme and confident judgments than Ss who thought they received category information. This indicates that Ss' judgments were not simply a function of implicit demand: The illusion of receiving individuating information led Ss to believe they possessed the necessary evidence for legitimate decision making. This result supports the existence of rules in the social inference process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The perceiver as perceived: Everyday intuitions about the correspondence bias.

This research examined people's intuitions about the correspondence bias, or the tendency to favor dispositional rather than situational explanations of behavior. In 3 studies, constrained actors overestimated the magnitude of observers' correspondent inferences. Additional studies indicated that this overestimation is due to people's oversimplified theories about the attributional processes of others. In one, Japanese participants, whose culture places greater emphasis on situational explanations of behavior, did not overestimate the correspondent inferences of observers. In other studies, participants indicated that they thought others' attributions are more influenced by an actor's behavior than by the factors constraining the behavior. Discussion focuses on whether people believe others are more prone to the correspondence bias than they are themselves and on the consequences of overestimating the correspondence bias in everyday interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Staff perceptions of emotional distress in paitents with burn trauma.

Objective: To compare staff and patient perceptions of patients' emotional distress after acute burn trauma. Design: Staff ratings of patients' psychological states on 6 dimensions of emotional functioning were compared with patient self-report. Results: Staff as a whole and by discipline tended to overestimate depression and underestimate optimism in patients. Moreover, the more experienced (more than 2 years of burn care experience) nurses and occupational/physical therapists were less accurate in estimating depression and optimism than their less experienced counterparts. Conclusion: Consistent with results from spinal cord injury research, findings from the current study indicate a distinct tendency on the part of burn care staff to overestimate their patients' emotional distress and underestimate their positive outlook, supporting the notion that staff may be imposing a "requirement for mourning" on their patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social comparison and depression: Company's effect on misery.

Two studies examined the social comparison processes of 50 depressed and 48 nondepressed college students selected on the basis of their scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. In the 1st study, Ss' preferences for information from others were assessed after they had received a manipulation intended to improve or worsen their mood states. The responses of the depressed Ss provide evidence of downward comparison: They indicate a preference for information from people who were experiencing negative affect, but only when they themselves were also experiencing relatively negative affect, not when their moods had been temporarily improved. In the 2nd study, Ss' moods were assessed before and after they had received information indicating another person was currently experiencing highly negative affect. This information had little effect on the nondepressed Ss; however, the mood states of the depressed Ss improved after they read the information. Results suggest that realizing that others are doing worse may help depressed persons to feel somewhat better. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pluralistic ignorance: When similarity is interpreted as dissimilarity.

Pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals infer that the identical actions of the self and others reflect different internal states. We propose that pluralistic ignorance arises most commonly in contexts where individuals believe that fear of embarrassment is a sufficient cause for their own behavior but not for the behavior of others. Three predictions derived from the proposed analysis were tested. In Experiment I, we examined the hypothesis that people believe that they possess more of those traits that lead to social inhibition than do others. Ratings of the self and the average other on a series of trait dimensions supported this hypothesis. In Experiment 2, we pursued the hypothesis that people believe that fear of embarrassment is a more potent determinant of their own behavior than of the behavior of others. Subjects first were given an opportunity to engage in or refrain from engaging in an action that potentially had both beneficial and embarrassing consequences. They then were asked to estimate the percentage of other subjects whom they believed would act similarly. Consistent with the predictions, subjects both avoided the embarrassing course of action and overestimated the percentage of others who took it. In Experiment 3, groups of subjects were placed in the same context that confronted the individual subjects in Experiment 2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do people aggress to improve their mood? Catharsis beliefs, affect regulation opportunity, and aggressive responding.

Do people aggress to make themselves feel better? We adapted a procedure used by G. K. Manucia, D. J. Baumann, and R. B. Cialdini (1984), in which some participants are given a bogus mood-freezing pill that makes affect regulation efforts ineffective. In Study 1, people who had been induced to believe in the value of catharsis and venting anger responded more aggressively than did control participants to insulting criticism, but this aggression was eliminated by the mood-freezing pill. Study 2 showed similar results among people with high anger-out (i.e., expressing and venting anger) tendencies. Studies 3 and 4 provided questionnaire data consistent with these interpretations, and Study 5 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 using measures more directly concerned with affect regulation. Taken together, these results suggest that many people may engage in aggression to regulate (improve) their own affective states. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Feeling "holier than thou": Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction?

People typically believe they are more likely to engage in selfless, kind, and generous behaviors than their peers, a result that is both logically and statistically suspect. However, this oft-documented tendency presents an important ambiguity. Do people feel "holier than thou" because they harbor overly cynical views of their peers (but accurate impressions of themselves) or overly charitable views of themselves (and accurate impressions of their peers)? Four studies suggested it was the latter. Participants consistently overestimated the likelihood that they would act in generous or selfless ways, whereas their predictions of others were considerably more accurate. Two final studies suggest this divergence in accuracy arises, in part, because people are unwilling to consult population base rates when predicting their own behavior but use this diagnostic information more readily when predicting others'. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social schemata of peripheral changes in emotion.

Psychophysiological research failed to establish consistent physiological patterns differentiating emotion. Recent data showed that people verbally report experiencing peripheral changes that differ among emotions. The present studies tested the hypothesis that these reports originate in social schemata. Study 1 showed that Ss' reports of peripheral changes experienced during actual emotion do not differ from those defined in social schemata. Studies 2 and 3 showed that these schemata are similar across cultures. Overall, these data suggest that (a) people can directly access schemata about peripheral changes in emotion, (b) people are likely to do so when they believe to be reporting actual memories of such changes, and (c) the specific patterns revealed by past research may reflect prototypical knowledge of emotion. Finally, the data highlight the various peripheral patterns as they exist in schematic knowledge of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy.

Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple-choice tests. Virtually all research on this topic, however, has suggested that this strategy is ill-founded: Most answer changes are from incorrect to correct, and people who change their answers usually improve their test scores. Why do people believe in this strategy if the data so strongly refute it? The authors argue that the belief is in part a product of counterfactual thinking. Changing an answer when one should have stuck with one's original answer leads to more "if only . . ." self-recriminations than does sticking with one's first instinct when one should have switched. As a consequence, instances of the former are more memorable than instances of the latter. This differential availability provides individuals with compelling (albeit illusory) personal evidence for the wisdom of always following their 1st instinct, with suboptimal test scores the result. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)