When focusing on differences leads to similar perspectives.

The current research investigated whether mind-sets and contexts that afford a focus on self-other differences can facilitate perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Supporting this hypothesis, results showed that directly priming a difference mind-set made perceivers more likely to spontaneously adopt other people's visual perspectives (Experiment 1) and less likely to overimpute their own privileged knowledge to others (Experiments 2 and 3). Given that intergroup encounters typically evoke a difference mind-set, we also explored the possibility that such contexts might help perceivers to step outside their own perspectives. As predicted, perceivers were less "cursed" by their own privileged knowledge when mentalizing about out-group targets than when mentalizing about in-group targets (Experiment 4) and communicated more effectively with interaction partners whose minimal-group membership differed from their own (Experiment 5). Overall, acknowledging self-other differences allowed perceivers to look beyond the limits of their own perspectives and thereby provided an efficacious route to intuiting other people's minds.

Self-prediction of hedonic trajectories for repeated use of body products and foods: poor performance, not improved by a full generation of experience.

This study extends earlier work by [Kahneman, D., and Snell, J. (1992). Predicting a changing taste: Do people know what they will like? Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 5, 187-200.]. suggesting that people are poor at predicting changes in liking. This is an important issue because an absence of this ability would make it difficult for people to optimize their own choices. Twenty undergraduates and 20 of their parents sampled four relatively unfamiliar consumer products, two foods and two body products, for 8 days. On Day 1, participants rated their initial liking and predicted their liking after seven daily uses of the products. Predictions were compared to actual liking on Day 8. Consistent with prior work, participants were poor at predicting their actual hedonic trajectories because they underestimated the degree to which their preferences would change. Contrary to predictions, parents were no better than students at this task, even though they had some 20-39 years more experience in observing their own hedonic trajectories. There is no evidence for any parent-child resemblance in either liking for the products or ability to accurately predict hedonic trajectory, and no evidence for consistency in ability to predict trajectories across the four different products. In general, participants underestimate the degree to which their preferences will change.

Some evidence about character and mate selection.

The authors conducted four studies (total N = 292) about character and mate desirability. In Study 1, undergraduates judged stimuli for attractiveness-physically and as a casual or longterm date. The target was described as faithful, having cheated but stayed with mates, or having cheated and left. Contrary to the hypothesis, men and women were equally affected by both kinds of cheaters. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with nonstudent adults. In Study 3, undergraduates rated a stimulus on the same attractiveness variables. This target had $14 million from winning a lottery or selling a dot-com company. Women, but not men, found the dot-com creator to be more physically attractive than the lottery winner. In Study 4, undergraduates rated someone who sold a cookie-making company or profited from a lucky real estate transaction. Both men and women preferred the cookie-company seller on all three measures of attractiveness.