Elasticity of emotions to multiple interpersonal transgressions.

After an interpersonal mishap-like blowing off plans with a friend, forgetting a spouse's birthday, or falling behind on a group project-wrongdoers typically feel guilty for their misbehavior, and victims feel angry. These emotions are believed to possess reparative functions; their expression prevents future mistakes from reiterating. However, little research has examined people's emotional reactions to mistakes that happen more than once. In seven preregistered studies, we assessed wrongdoers' and victims' emotions that arise after one transgression and again after another. Following two (or more) consecutive transgressions, wrongdoers felt guiltier, and victims felt angrier. However, from one transgression to the next, increases to anger were significantly greater than increases to guilt. Likewise, after transgression repair, anger decreased more than guilt did. In short, we found that anger is more elastic than guilt, which suggests a new perspective on emotions: The sensitivity to which emotions update in response to new circumstances. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The biography of discovery: How unintentional discovery of resources influences choice and preference.

An archeologist discovers a 1,500-year-old Viking sword at the bottom of a lake. Would people be more drawn to the sword if they knew that the discovery was intentional, or unintentional? The current research examines this previously unexplored type of biographical narrative-the biography of the discovery of historical and natural resources. We propose that unintentionality in the discovery of a resource can shape choice and preference. We focus our investigation on resources because the event of discovery is an inherent component in the biography of all known historical and natural resources, and because these resources are either themselves already objects (like historical artifacts) or are the building blocks of virtually all objects. Eight laboratory studies and one field experiment indicate that the unintentional discovery of resources heightens the choice of and preference for the resources. We find that the unintentional discovery of a resource triggers counterfactual thoughts about how the discovery might not have occurred, increasing perceptions that the discovery was fated, consequently driving choice of and preference for the resource. Further, we identify the level of expertise of the discoverer as a theoretically relevant moderator of this effect, finding that the effect is eliminated in the case of novice discoverers. It arises for resources discovered by experts with the rationale that unintentional discovery by an expert is unexpected, and therefore prompts heightened counterfactual thoughts. However, resources discovered by novices for which discovery is unexpected whether it is intentional or unintentional are preferred at equally high rates. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Unintentional Inception: When a Premium Is Offered to Unintentional Creations.

Creations can be fundamentally intended or unintended from their outset. Past work has focused on intentional creations, finding that people place a premium on effort. We examine the role of unintentionality in the inception of creations in six studies using a variety of stimuli (N = 1,965), finding that people offer a premium to unintentional creations versus otherwise identical intentional creations. We demonstrate that the unintentionality involved in the inception of a creation results in greater downward counterfactual thought about how the unintentional creation may have never been created at all, and this in turn heightens perceptions that the creation was a product of fate, causing people to place a premium on such creations. We provide evidence for this causal pathway using a combination of mediation and moderation approaches. Further, we illuminate that this premium is not offered when a negative outcome is ascribed to an unintentional creation.

Choice protection for feeling-focused decisions.

Whether guided by feelings or deliberation, most decisions entail selecting an option and then living with it. Beyond simply investigating which option people select and how they evaluate it right away, the present research examines the extended issue of how people think and act in the service of that choice as a function of how they decided in the first place. We propose that reliance on feelings over deliberation in making an initial decision will strengthen postchoice protection of chosen options against threats. Seven studies provide evidence that feeling-focused deciders prove more mentally, emotionally, and behaviorally staunch in their defense of chosen options in response to a range of different campaigns against them. Together, a focus on feelings emerges as a decision strategy with broad relevance for the extended issue of how decision makers navigate the postchoice course. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Feeling certain: Gut choice, the true self, and attitude certainty.

Decisions need not always be deliberative. Instead, people confronting choices can recruit their gut feelings, processing information about choice options in accordance with how they feel about options rather than what they think about them. Reliance on feelings can change what people choose, but might this decision strategy also impact how people evaluate their chosen options? The present investigation tackles this question by integrating insights from the separate literatures on the true self and attitude certainty. Four studies support a process model by which focusing on feelings (vs. deliberation) in choice causes people to see their true selves reflected in those choices (Studies 1 and 2), leading to enhanced attitude certainty (Study 3) and advocacy on behalf of that attitude (Study 4) while offering robustness checks and accounting for alternative explanations throughout. Discussion of these findings highlights the opportunity for new insights at the intersection of feeling-focused decision making, attitudes, and the true self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The good and bad of ambivalence: Desiring ambivalence under outcome uncertainty.

Decades of past research point to the downside of evaluative inconsistency (i.e., ambivalence), suggesting that it is an unpleasant state that can result in negative affect. Consequently, people are often motivated to resolve their ambivalence in various ways. We propose that people sometimes desire to be ambivalent as a means of strategic self-protection. Across employment, educational and consumer choice settings, we demonstrate that when people are uncertain they can obtain a desired target, they will cultivate ambivalence in order to protect their feelings in the event that they fail to get what they want. Specifically, we show that people consciously desire to cultivate ambivalence as a way to emotionally hedge and that they seek out and process information in ways to deliberately cultivate ambivalence. We find that people are most likely to generate ambivalence when they are most uncertain that they can obtain their desired target. Depending on the outcome, this cultivated ambivalence can either be useful (when the desired target is not obtained) or backfire (when the desired target is obtained).

Pressure and perverse flights to familiarity.

Under pressure, people often prefer what is familiar, which can seem safer than the unfamiliar. We show that such favoring of familiarity can lead to choices precisely contrary to the source of felt pressure, thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating, its negative consequences. In Experiment 1, time pressure increased participants' frequency of choosing to complete a longer but incidentally familiar task option (as opposed to a shorter but unfamiliar alternative), resulting in increased felt stress during task completion. In Experiment 2, pressure to reach a performance benchmark in a chosen puzzle increased participants' frequency of choosing an incidentally familiar puzzle that both augured and delivered objectively worse performance (i.e., fewer points obtained). Participants favored this familiar puzzle even though familiarity was established through unpleasant prior experience. This "devil you know" preference under pressure contrasted with disfavoring of the negatively familiar option in a pressure-free situation. These results demonstrate that pressure-induced flights to familiarity can sometimes aggravate rather than ameliorate pressure, and can occur even when available evidence points to the suboptimality of familiar options.

Perceptual accuracy and conflicting effects of certainty on risk-taking behaviour.

The 'certainty effect' is a notable violation of expected utility theory by decision makers. It shows that people's tendency to select the safer of two prospects increases when this prospect provides a good outcome with certainty (for example, people prefer a monetary gain of 3 with certainty over 4 with a probability of 0.8, but do not prefer 3 with a probability of 0.25 over 4 with a probability of 0.2). Subsequent work on experience-based decision making in rats extended the certainty effect to other animals, suggesting its generality across different species and different decision-making mechanisms. However, an attempt to replicate this study with human subjects showed a surprising 'reversed certainty effect', namely, the tendency to prefer the safer option decreases when this prospect is associated with certainty (and people now prefer 4 with a probability of 0.8 over 3 with certainty). Here we show that these conflicting results can be explained by perceptual noise and that the certainty effect can be restored experimentally by reducing perceptual accuracy. Using complementary experiments in humans and honeybees (Apis mellifera), we show that by manipulating perceptual accuracy in experience-based tasks, both the certainty and the reversed certainty effects can be exhibited by humans and other animals: the certainty effect emerges when it is difficult to discriminate between the different rewards, whereas the reversed certainty effect emerges when discrimination is easy. Our results fit a simple process-based model of matching behaviour, capable of explaining the certainty effect in humans and other animals that make repeated decisions based on experience. This mechanism should probably be distinguished from those involved in the original certainty effect that was exhibited by human subjects in single description-based problems.