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Gowdy & Krall's target article complements our recent theorizing on group behavior. In our comment, we elucidate complementary aspects of the two theories and highlight the importance of differentiation of selves for human groups to reap the benefits of ultrasociality. We propose that achieving optimal group outcomes depends on the differentiation of individual selves.

Caruso, Vohs, Baxter, and Waytz (2013) posited that because money is used in free market exchanges, cues of money would lead people to justify and support the systems that allow those exchanges to take place. Hence, the authors predicted that money primes would boost system justification, social dominance, belief in a just world, and free market ideology, and found supportive evidence. Rohrer, Pashler, and Harris (2015) failed to replicate those effects. This article discusses the factors that predict priming effects, and particularly those pertinent to differences between Caruso et al. and Rohrer et al. Variations in a prime's meaning, the ease with which primed content comes to mind, the prime's motivational importance, and the ambiguity of the outcome situation influence the impact of the prime. Money priming experiments (totaling 165 to date, from 18 countries) point to at least 2 major effects. First, compared to neutral primes, people reminded of money are less interpersonally attuned. They are not prosocial, caring, or warm. They eschew interdependence. Second, people reminded of money shift into professional, business, and work mentality. They exert effort on challenging tasks, demonstrate good performance, and feel efficacious. Money priming is not the same as priming another popular means of exchange, credit cards, and can have bigger effects when there is an implied connection between the self and having money. The practical benefits of money have been studied by other disciplines for decades, and the time is now for psychologists to study the effects of merely being reminded of money., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Four studies tested the hypothesis that a weaker belief in free will would be related to feeling less gratitude. In Studies 1a and 1b, a trait measure of free will belief was positively correlated with a measure of dispositional gratitude. In Study 2, participants whose free will belief was weakened (vs. unchanged or bolstered) reported feeling less grateful for events in their past. Study 3 used a laboratory induction of gratitude. Participants with an experimentally reduced (vs. increased) belief in free will reported feeling less grateful for the favor. In Study 4, a reduced (vs. increased) belief in free will led to less gratitude in a hypothetical favor scenario. This effect was serially mediated by perceiving the benefactor as having less free will and therefore as being less sincerely motivated. These findings suggest that belief in free will is an important part of being able to feel gratitude., (© 2014 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.)

Psychologists debate whether consciousness or unconsciousness is most central to human behavior. Our goal, instead, is to figure out how they work together. Conscious processes are partly produced by unconscious processes, and much information processing occurs outside of awareness. Yet, consciousness has advantages that the unconscious does not. We discuss how consciousness causes behavior, drawing conclusions from large-scale literature reviews.

Four experiments tested the novel hypothesis that ritualistic behavior potentiates and enhances ensuing consumption--an effect found for chocolates, lemonade, and even carrots. Experiment 1 showed that participants who engaged in ritualized behavior, compared with those who did not, evaluated chocolate as more flavorful, valuable, and deserving of behavioral savoring. Experiment 2 demonstrated that random gestures do not boost consumption as much as ritualistic gestures do. It further showed that a delay between a ritual and the opportunity to consume heightens enjoyment, which attests to the idea that ritual behavior stimulates goal-directed action (to consume). Experiment 3 found that performing a ritual oneself enhances consumption more than watching someone else perform the same ritual, suggesting that personal involvement is crucial for the benefits of rituals to emerge. Finally, Experiment 4 provided direct evidence of the underlying process: Rituals enhance the enjoyment of consumption because of the greater involvement in the experience that they prompt.

Order and disorder are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that each environ confers advantages for different outcomes. Three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention-and that both settings can alter preferences, choice, and behavior. Experiment 1 showed that relative to participants in a disorderly room, participants in an orderly room chose healthier snacks and donated more money. Experiment 2 showed that participants in a disorderly room were more creative than participants in an orderly room. Experiment 3 showed a predicted crossover effect: Participants in an orderly room preferred an option labeled as classic, but those in a disorderly room preferred an option labeled as new. Whereas prior research on physical settings has shown that orderly settings encourage better behavior than disorderly ones, the current research tells a nuanced story of how different environments suit different outcomes.

The present research tested whether incidental exposure to money affects people's endorsement of social systems that legitimize social inequality. We found that subtle reminders of the concept of money, relative to nonmoney concepts, led participants to endorse more strongly the existing social system in the United States in general (Experiment 1) and free-market capitalism in particular (Experiment 4), to assert more strongly that victims deserve their fate (Experiment 2), and to believe more strongly that socially advantaged groups should dominate socially disadvantaged groups (Experiment 3). We further found that reminders of money increased preference for a free-market system of organ transplants that benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor even though this was not the prevailing system (Experiment 5) and that this effect was moderated by participants' nationality. These results demonstrate how merely thinking about money can influence beliefs about the social order and the extent to which people deserve their station in life., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.)

Much research has shown that after being self-affirmed, people respond to challenges in healthy, productive ways, including better task performance. The current research demonstrates that self-affirmation can also deflate motivation and performance, a pattern consistent with goal disengagement. We posited that being self-affirmed and then attempting but failing at a task would lead people to retreat from the goal. In support of this hypothesis, 4 experiments found that the combination of self-affirmation and the experience of failure led to demotivation and effort reduction. Experiment 1 found that self-affirmed participants, more so than nonaffirmed participants, reported being open to goal disengagement. Experiment 2 found that affirming core values before trying a task beset with failure reduced task motivation and performance. Experiment 3 demonstrated the robustness of the effect and found that failure on one task reduced motivation and performance on a new but related task. Experiment 4 revealed that being self-affirmed and experiencing failure caused participants to feel less capable of pursuing their goals, which produced poorer performance. These findings suggest that affirming the self can lead people to internalize the implications of failure, which in turn leads to goal disengagement.

When do people feel as if they are rich in time? Not often, research and daily experience suggest. However, three experiments showed that participants who felt awe, relative to other emotions, felt they had more time available (Experiments 1 and 3) and were less impatient (Experiment 2). Participants who experienced awe also were more willing to volunteer their time to help other people (Experiment 2), more strongly preferred experiences over material products (Experiment 3), and experienced greater life satisfaction (Experiment 3). Mediation analyses revealed that these changes in decision making and well-being were due to awe's ability to alter the subjective experience of time. Experiences of awe bring people into the present moment, and being in the present moment underlies awe's capacity to adjust time perception, influence decisions, and make life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise.

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they "knew it all along," that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. Hindsight bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events' objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one's own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one's judgments. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias., (© The Author(s) 2012.)

In the present study, we used experience sampling to measure desires and desire regulation in everyday life. Our analysis included data from 205 adults, who furnished a total of 7,827 reports of their desires over the course of a week. Across various desire domains, results revealed substantial differences in desire frequency and strength, the degree of conflict between desires and other goals, and the likelihood of resisting desire and the success of this resistance. Desires for sleep and sex were experienced most intensively, whereas desires for tobacco and alcohol had the lowest average strength, despite the fact that these substances are thought of as addictive. Desires for leisure and sleep conflicted the most with other goals, and desires for media use and work brought about the most self-control failure. In addition, we observed support for a limited-resource model of self-control employing a novel operationalization of cumulative resource depletion: The frequency and recency of engaging in prior self-control negatively predicted people's success at resisting subsequent desires on the same day.

What is the nature and function of relief? Relief has been studied little in psychological science despite its familiarity and pervasiveness. Two studies revealed that relief can result from two distinct situations: the narrow avoidance of an aversive outcome (near-miss relief) and completion of an onerous or aversive event (task-completion relief). Study 1 found that recollections of near-miss relief were marked by more downward counterfactual thoughts and greater feelings of social isolation than recollections of task-completion relief. Study 2 experimentally elicited the two types of relief and found mediational evidence that relief following near misses elicits feelings of social isolation via its stimulation of counterfactual thinking. That near-miss relief is characterized by counterfactual thinking suggests that it prompts people to contemplate how to avert similar experiences in the future, whereas task-completion relief may serve to reinforce endurance during difficult tasks.

Perceived message effectiveness is often used as a diagnostic tool to determine whether a health message is likely to be successful or needs modification before use in an intervention. Yet, published research on the antecedents of perceived effectiveness is scarce and, consequently, little is known about why a message is perceived to be effective or ineffective. The present study's aim was to identify and test the affective antecedents of perceived effectiveness of antidrug television messages in a sample of 190 adolescents in the 15-19 year age range. Factor-analytical tests of retrospective message evaluation items suggested two dimensions of perceived effectiveness, one that contained items such as convincingness whereas the other contained pleasantness items. Using retrospective data as well as real time valence and arousal ratings, we found that arousal underlies perceived convincingness and valence underlies perceived pleasantness. The results indicated activation of appetitive and defensive motivational systems, which suggests a clear motivational component to the concept of perceived message effectiveness., (© Society for Prevention Research 2011)

Conspicuous consumption is a form of economic behavior in which self-presentational concerns override desires to obtain goods at bargain prices. Showy spending may be a social signal directed at potential mates. We investigated such signals by examining (a) which individuals send them, (b) which contexts trigger them, and (c) how observers interpret them. Three experiments demonstrated that conspicuous consumption is driven by men who are following a lower investment (vs. higher investment) mating strategy and is triggered specifically by short-term (vs. long-term) mating motives. A fourth experiment showed that observers interpret such signals accurately, with women perceiving men who conspicuously consume as being interested in short-term mating. Furthermore, conspicuous purchasing enhanced men's desirability as a short-term (but not as a long-term) mate. Overall, these findings suggest that flaunting status-linked goods to potential mates is not simply about displaying economic resources. Instead, conspicuous consumption appears to be part of a more precise signaling system focused on short-term mating. These findings contribute to an emerging literature on human life-history strategies.

Everyday intuitions suggest full conscious control of behavior, but evidence of unconscious causation and automaticity has sustained the contrary view that conscious thought has little or no impact on behavior. We review studies with random assignment to experimental manipulations of conscious thought and behavioral dependent measures. Topics include mental practice and simulation, anticipation, planning, reflection and rehearsal, reasoning, counterproductive effects, perspective taking, self-affirmation, framing, communication, and overriding automatic responses. The evidence for conscious causation of behavior is profound, extensive, adaptive, multifaceted, and empirically strong. However, conscious causation is often indirect and delayed, and it depends on interplay with unconscious processes. Consciousness seems especially useful for enabling behavior to be shaped by nonpresent factors and by social and cultural information, as well as for dealing with multiple competing options or impulses. It is plausible that almost every human behavior comes from a mixture of conscious and unconscious processing.

Seven experiments showed that the effects of social acceptance and social exclusion on self-regulatory performance depend on the prospect of future acceptance. Excluded participants showed decrements in self-regulation, but these decrements were eliminated if the self-regulation task was ostensibly a diagnostic indicator of the ability to get along with others. No such improvement was found when the task was presented as diagnostic of good health. Accepted participants, in contrast, performed relatively poorly when the task was framed as a diagnostic indicator of interpersonally attractive traits. Furthermore, poor performance among accepted participants was not due to self-handicapping or overconfidence. Offering accepted participants a cash incentive for self-regulating eliminated the self-regulation deficits. These findings provide evidence that the need to belong fits standard motivational patterns: Thwarting the drive intensifies it, whereas satiating it leads to temporary reduction in drive. Accepted people are normally good at self-regulation but are unwilling to exert the effort to self-regulate if self-regulation means gaining the social acceptance they have already obtained.

Objective: This study investigated domain-specific (appearance, interpersonal, and academic) interactive relationships of perfectionism, self-efficacy, and stress to dieting and binge eating, positing that the level of weight/shape self-efficacy would be pivotal in identifying elevated dieting versus elevated binge eating., Method: Participants were 406 randomly selected undergraduate women. At two time points (T1 and T2), 11 weeks apart, participants completed measures of dieting and binge eating attitudes/behaviors as well as domain-specific measures of perfectionism and self-efficacy (e.g., perfectionism related to appearance). Between T1 and T2, participants completed inventories weekly on the previous week's weight/shape, interpersonal, and academic stressors., Results: The combination of high interpersonal perfectionism, low interpersonal self-efficacy, high interpersonal stress, and high weight/shape self-efficacy was associated with the most elevated dieting. The hypothesized interactions related to the appearance and academic domains where not supported., Conclusion: These results highlight the interpersonal context for dieting and the unique relationship between weight/shape self-efficacy and dieting., ((c) 2008 by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the authors hypothesized that decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices. Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers' self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating and forming preferences about options and more depleting than implementing choices made by someone else and that anticipating the choice task as enjoyable can reduce the depleting effect for the first choices but not for many choices., ((c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Comments on the original article "Do people's self-views matter? Self-concept and self-esteem in everyday life," by W. B. Swann, Jr., C. Chang-Schneider, and K. L. McClarty. Swann et al argued that people's self-views, and their global self-esteem in particular, yield a suite of behavioral effects that are beneficial to the individual and to society at large. The Swann et al article is the latest link in a debate on the causal utility of self-esteem. Specifically, the article is a reply to a report published by the American Psychological Society Task Force on Self-Esteem (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003). As members of that task force, the current authors wish to express their broad agreement with Swann et al. At the same time, in the comment presented here, they clarify pockets of disagreement., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved.)

Objective: To conduct a prospective, longitudinal study examining weight fluctuation and its predictors before and during the first year of college., Design: Men (n = 266) and women (n = 341) enrolled at Dartmouth College (age range: 16 to 26; body mass index range: 15.0 to 42.9) provided self-reports of weight and height and completed measures of self-esteem, eating habits, interpersonal relationships, exercise patterns, and disordered eating behaviors both in their senior year of high school and either 3, 6, or 9 months into college., Main Outcome Measure: Self-reported weight was the primary outcome indicator., Results: Analyses indicated that both men and women gained a significant amount of weight (3.5 and 4.0 pounds, respectively). Weight gain occurred before November of the first academic year and was maintained as the year progressed. College freshmen gain weight at a much higher rate than that of average American adults. For men, frequently engaging in exercise predicted weight gain. Having troublesome relationships with parents also predicted weight gain in men, whereas for women, having positive relationships with parents predicted weight gain., Conclusion: Understanding the predictors of early college weight gain may aid in the development of prevention programs., ((Copyright) 2008 APA.)

This paper highlights the not-so-obvious but compelling reasons why the same supportive audiences that can help performers attain their highest potential also may increase performers' risk of choking under pressure. Drawing primarily from social psychology research and theory, we conclude that audience support magnifies performance pressure and induces performers to avoid failure rather than seek success during the most critical moments of performance contests. Although supportive audiences can inspire performers to excel when motivation would otherwise be lacking, audiences may also lead performers towards maladaptive self-monitoring and overcautiousness when the stakes are highest. The increased self-focus that supportive audiences induce can disrupt the automatic execution of the skills performers possess. Dispositional and situational moderators of the relationship between audience support and performance are reviewed.

Self-presentation may require self-regulation, especially when familiar or dispositional tendencies must be overridden in service of the desired impression. Studies 1-4 showed that self-presentation under challenging conditions or according to counter-normative patterns (presenting oneself modestly to strangers, boastfully to friends, contrary to gender norms, to a skeptical audience, or while being a racial token) led to impaired self-regulation later, suggesting that those self-presentations depleted self-regulatory resources. When self-presentation conformed to familiar, normative, or dispositional patterns, self-regulation was less implicated. Studies 5-8 showed that when resources for self-regulation had been depleted by prior acts of self-control, self-presentation drifted toward less-effective patterns (talking too much, overly or insufficiently intimate disclosures, or egotistical arrogance). Thus, inner processes may serve interpersonal functions, although optimal interpersonal activity exacts a short-term cost., (Copyright 2005 APA.)

A naturalistic study examined the effects of self-esteem and threats to the self on interpersonal appraisals. Self-esteem scores, ego threat (operationalized as a substantial decrease in self-esteem across an average of 9 months), and their interaction were used to predict likability and personality perceptions of college men and women. The results revealed a curvilinear function explaining likability: Moderate to low self-esteem men and women were higher in likability when threatened, whereas high self-esteem men were seen as less likable when threatened. Personality ratings indicated that high self-esteem men and women who were threatened were rated highest on Antagonism (i.e., fake, arrogant, unfriendly, rude, and uncooperative). Mediational analyses revealed that differences in Antagonism statistically accounted for differences in likability. These patterns are interpreted with respect to gender and time in interpersonal perceptions as well as naturalistic versus laboratory investigations.

These studies investigated self-regulation and subjective experience of time from the perspective of the regulatory resource model. Studies 1-2 showed that participants who were instructed to regulate their emotions while viewing a film clip perceived that the film lasted longer than participants who did not regulate their emotions. In Study 3, participants provided time estimates during a resource-depleting or nondepleting task. Subsequent task persistence was measured. Time perceptions mediated the effect of initial self-regulation on subsequent self-regulated performance. In Study 4, participants performed either a resource-depleting or a nondepleting thought-listing task and then performed a different regulatorytask. Compared with nondepleted participants, depleted participants persisted less on the 2nd task but estimated that they had persisted longer. Subjective time estimates statistically accounted for reduced persistence after depletion. Together, results indicate people believe that self-regulatory endeavors last overly long, a belief that may result in abandonment of further self-control.

Some complex thinking requires active guidance by the self, but simpler mental activities do not. Depletion of the self's regulatory resources should therefore impair the former and not the latter. Resource depletion was manipulated by having some participants initially regulate attention (Studies 1 and 3) or emotion (Study 2). As compared with no-regulation participants who did not perform such exercises, depleted participants performed worse at logic and reasoning (Study 1), cognitive extrapolation (Study 2), and a test of thoughtful reading comprehension (Study 3). The same manipulations failed to cause decrements on a test of general knowledge (Study 2) or on memorization and recall of nonsense syllables (Study 3). Successful performance at complex thinking may therefore rely on limited regulatory resources.