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In this article we examine intolerance toward ideological outgroups, conceptualized as the negativity of the attitudes of liberals and conservatives toward their ideological outgroup. We show that conservatives are more ideologically intolerant than liberals and that the more intelligent are more ideologically intolerant than the less intelligent. We also show that the differences between liberals and conservatives and the differences between the more and less intelligent depend on ideological extremity: They are larger for extreme than for moderate ideologists. The implication of these results to questions regarding the relationship between intelligence and ideological intolerance and regarding the relationship between ideology and prejudice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

This research explores the consequences of two states of mind on judgment: a subjective state, looking at the world from one's own eyes, and an objective state, in which one thinks of oneself from the imagined perspective of an external observer. In six experiments, we show that judgments people make while they are in a subjective state of mind are more influenced by metacognitive experience compared with judgments people make when they are in an objective state of mind. This is demonstrated in Experiments 1-3, using two different manipulations for the two states of mind and two different fluency tasks. Experiment 4 explores the underlying mechanism and demonstrates that an objective state does not lessen the metacognitive experience itself; rather, it affects the reliance on this experience as a relevant source of information. Finally, in Experiments 5 and 6 we investigate implications of our hypothesis for doing experimental research in psychology. We find that taking part in a laboratory experiment resembles the experimental condition of an objective state of mind, as participants rely less on their metacognition compared with conditions aimed to restore the subjective state of mind within the lab setting. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings regarding social influences on judgments and decisions in psychology labs and in the real world. (PsycINFO Database Record

This article suggests a theoretically driven explanation for a replication failure of one of the basic findings in psychology: the facial-feedback effect. According to the facial-feedback hypothesis, the facial activity associated with particular emotional expressions can influence people's affective experiences. Recently, a replication attempt of this effect in 17 laboratories around the world failed to find any support for the effect. We hypothesize that the reason for the failure of replication is that the replication protocol deviated from that of the original experiment in a critical factor. In all of the replication studies, participants were alerted that they would be monitored by a video camera, whereas the participants in the original study were not monitored, observed, or recorded. Previous findings indicate that feeling monitored or observed reduces reliance on internal cues in making judgments. Therefore, we hypothesize that recording the participants in the replication experiments reduced their reliance on the facial-feedback. To test the hypothesis, we replicated the facial-feedback experiment in 2 conditions: one with a video-camera and one without it. The results revealed a significant facial-feedback effect in the absence of a camera, which was eliminated in the camera's presence. These findings suggest that minute differences in the experimental protocol might lead to theoretically meaningful changes in the outcomes. In our view, the theoretical and methodological approach advocated by our study changes failed replications from being the "end of the road" regarding entire fields of study into a new road for growth regarding our understanding of human nature. (PsycINFO Database Record

The danger of receiving false information is omnipresent, and people might be highly vigilant against being influenced by falsehoods. Yet, as research on misinformation reveals, people are often biased by false information, even when they know the valid alternative. The question is: why? The current research explores the relative encoding strength of 2 opposing alternatives involved in the correction of falsehood: the false concept and the valid concept. These encoding strengths may be critical for what people remember and how they act upon receiving false information. We compared 2 triggers for the correction of falsehood-a sentence consisting of clearly false information (e.g., honey is made by butterflies) and a sentence consisting of an explicit negation of this information (e.g., honey is not made by butterflies). The general pattern of results from 5 experiments demonstrates that the valid concept (e.g., bees) exhibits a weaker presence in memory than the false concept (e.g., butterflies) following the comprehension of evidently false information as compared to its explicit negation. Thus, the current research provides an answer to the riddle of the persistence of false information: False information is less likely to be mentally corrected if it is not explicitly negated. Even when people detect that a sentence is false, they tend to focus on the false concept rather than on the valid concept. These findings shed new light on extant research and offer fresh insights about the processing of false information and related phenomena such as the reliance on misinformation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Imagination sometimes leads people to behave, feel, and think as though imagined events were real even when they know they were not. In this paper, we suggest that some understanding of these phenomena can be achieved by differentiating between Implicit Truth Value (ITV), a spontaneous truth evaluation, and Explicit Truth Value (ETV), a self-reported truth judgment. In three experiments, we measure ITV using the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (Sartori, Agosta, Zogmaister, Ferrara, & Castiello, 2008), which has been used to assess which of two autobiographical events is true. Our findings demonstrate that imagining an event, like experiencing an event, increases its ITV, even when people explicitly acknowledge the imagined event as false (Experiments 1a and 1b). Furthermore, we show that imagined representations generated from a first-person perspective have higher ITV than imagined representations generated from a third-person perspective (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures of truth differ in their sensitivity to properties underlying truth judgment. We discuss the contribution of characterizing events according to both ITV and ETV to the understanding of various psychological phenomena, such as lying and self-deception.

One of the most robust laws of memory is that repeated activation improves memory. Our study shows that the nature of repetition matters. Specifically, although both negated repetition and affirmative repetition improve memory compared with no repetition, negated repetition hinders memory compared with affirmative repetition. After showing participants different entities, we asked them about features of these entities, leading to either "yes" or "no" responses. Our findings show that correctly negating an incorrect feature of an entity elicits an active forgetting effect compared with correctly affirming its true features. For example, after seeing someone drink a glass of white wine, answering "no" to "was it red wine?" may lead one to greater memory loss of the individual drinking wine at all compared with answering "yes" to "was it white wine?" We find this negation-induced forgetting effect in 4 experiments that differ in (a) the meaning given for the negation, (b) the type of stimuli (visual or verbal), and (c) the memory measure (recognition or free recall). We discuss possible underlying mechanisms and offer theoretical and applied implications of the negation-induced forgetting effect in relation to other known inhibition effects.

Past research shows that when people form judgments they rely not only on the content they access in memory but also on the ease with which this content is retrieved. The ease-of-retrieval (EOR) effect is an important marker for a class of phenomena in which people utilize metacognitive feelings in making judgments. Our investigation focuses on whether other people's involvement in the situation may be associated with a weakened EOR effect. We show that when concerns about other people's involvement were triggered in the context of self-judgments, the standard ease-of-retrieval effect disappeared (Experiments 1–3). Moreover, we hypothesize that thinking about others' motivations does not distract from encoding the ease of retrieval. Rather, it leads to the underutilization of this metacognitive information. Accordingly, we demonstrate that when EOR information is not manifested in an initial judgmental task it may be manifested in a later, seemingly unrelated, task (Experiments 3, 4).

When is choice affected by subliminal messages? This question has fascinated scientists and lay people alike, but it is only recently that reliable empirical data began to emerge. In the current paper we bridge the literature on implicit motivation and that on subliminal persuasion. We suggest that motivation in general, and implicit motivation more specifically, plays an important role in subliminal persuasion: It sensitizes us to subliminal cues. To examine this hypothesis we developed a new paradigm that allows powerful tests of subliminal influences as well as stringent assessments of subliminality. The results of two experiments suggest that implicit motivation can enhance the effects of subliminal priming on choice.

Two studies examined the association between attachment avoidance and empathic accuracy when perceiving strangers. In Study 1, participants with high attachment avoidance revealed lower accuracy in identifying the thoughts and feelings of their interaction partner compared with participants with low attachment avoidance. High-avoidance participants also tended to mentally distance themselves from the other and thought less often about him or her. Study 2 replicated the pattern of lower empathic accuracy for high-attachment-avoidance participants, this time, when respondents did not actually interact with the target of perception. We discuss reasons for why people with high attachment avoidance might show impaired empathic accuracy while interacting with strangers. We also consider more general influences of attachment avoidance on perception processes and, consequently, on social success. Previous research reveals that attachment avoidance is related to an increase in interpersonal difficulties (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Horowitz, Rosenberg, & Bartholomew, 1993) and increased feelings of loneliness (Hecht & Baum, 1984; Kobak & Sceery, 1988; Wei, Shaffer, Young, & Zakalik, 2005; Wei, Vogel, Ku, & Zakalik, 2005). Significantly, there are indications that for individuals who are characterized by high attachment avoidance, such difficulties come into play even in their first encounter with others (Aron

Over the past two decades, there has been an upsurge in theoretical frameworks alluding to the existence of two different processing systems that supposedly operate according to different rules. This article critically examines the scientific advance offered by these theories (in particular advances in the domains of reasoning, decision making, and social cognition) and questions their theoretical coherence as well as the evidence for their existence. We scrutinize the conceptual underpinnings of two-system models and explicate the assumptions underlying these models to see whether they are reasonable. We also evaluate the empirical paradigms used to validate two-system models and ponder about their explanatory strength and predictive power. Given the popularity of these models, we discuss the appeal of two-system theories and suggest potential reasons for their prevalence. We comment on the potential costs associated with these models and allude to the desired nature of potential alternatives. We conclude that two-system models currently provide little scientific advance, and we encourage researchers to adopt more rigorous conceptual definitions and employ more stringent criteria for testing the empirical evidence in support for two-system theories.

This investigation used a newly developed artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm in which participants were exposed to sequences of stimuli that varied in two dimensions (colours and letters) that were superimposed on each other. Variation within each dimension was determined by a different grammar. The results of two studies strongly suggest that implicit learning in AGL depends on the goal relevance of the to-be-learned dimension. Specifically, when only one of the two stimulus dimensions was relevant for their task (Experiment 1) participants learned the structure underlying the relevant, but not that of the irrelevant dimension. However, when both dimensions were relevant, both structures were learned (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that implicit learning occurs only in dimensions to which we are attuned. Based on the present results and on those of Eitam, Hassin, and Schul (2008) we suggest that focusing on goal relevance may provide new insights into the mechanisms underlying implicit learning.

We assume that a state of distrust is the mental system’s signal that the environment is not normal—things may not be as they appear. Hence, individuals sense they should be on guard. In particular, they are likely to avoid routine strategies, ones proven to be optimal and regularly used in normal environments, because these strategies are easily anticipated by whoever may be seeking to deceive them. Conversely, a state of trust is associated with a feeling of safety. The environment is as it normally is and things really are as they appear to be. Thus, individuals see no reason to refrain from doing what they routinely do. Accordingly, we hypothesize that figuring out a new situation depends on the type of environment and the actor’s state of mind: in normal environments, where routine strategies are optimal, individuals who trust should outperform those who distrust; however, in unusual environments, where non-routine strategies are optimal, individuals who distrust should outperform those who trust. This paper reports three experiments that manipulate distrust via orienting tasks that participants perform prior to attempting to predict a series of events (Experiments 1 and 2) or solve matchstick arithmetic problems (Experiment 3). Performance success depends on discovering and implementing an appropriate rule. We found that, as predicted, the manipulation of distrust sensitized participants to the existence of non-routine contingencies, that is, contingencies that were not expected.

In making social judgments people process effects caused by humans differently from effects caused by non-human agencies. We assume that when they have to predict outcomes that are attributed to non-human causes, people acknowledge their ignorance and try to focus on what is most diagnostic. However, when events are attributed to human agency, they believe that nothing is arbitrary and that one can understand the decision situation well enough to eliminate error. If so, then people should behave differently when an uncertainty is attributed to chance (a non-human agency) or to deception (a human agency). We tested this prediction using the probability-matching paradigm and found reasonable support for our analysis in four experiments. Individuals who attributed uncertainty to deception were less likely to adopt the optimal rule-based strategy than those who attributed it to chance. Indeed, only when the former were prevented from thinking about and elaborating the outcomes (the high-interference condition in Experiment 3) was their performance comparable to the level of individuals in the chance condition.

Negations (e.g., “Jim is not guilty”) are part of our daily language and communication. Linguistic and non-linguistic negations can occur when receivers counter-argue what communicators are saying, when hypotheses are disconfirmed, or through negative cognitive responses and many other social interactive processes. Our study explores how negations are encoded by considering the predictions of two theoretical models. According to the fusion model, the core of a negated message and the negation marker are integrated into one meaningful unit. Thus, Jim in the example might be encoded within the schema “innocence.” According to the schema-plus-tag model, a negated message is represented as a core supposition and a negation tag, allowing for dissociation of the two at a later point in time. We compare the two models by examining the nature of inferences that are facilitated by negations. Our results show that the existence of a schema that accommodates the meaning of the original negation is critical in determining how a negation will be encoded. When such a schema is not readily available, processing a negated message facilitates negation–incongruent associations, in line with predictions of the schema-plus-tag model. This model is also supported by analyses of respondents’ memory. We discuss implications of these findings for the communication of negated information, for discounting theories, and for the assessment of the truth of incoming information.

Past studies of strategic thinking have shown that the encoding of the message information becomes more complex under distrust. Receivers process the information as if they are trying to protect themselves from being misled by testing alternative potential interpretations. The present study investigates the possibility that when people are mistrustful they spontaneously activate associations that are incongruent with the given message. Findings from 3 experiments suggest that, even when the distrust is unrelated in any meaningful way to the message and even when receivers are unable to prepare a strategic response, the cognitive system reacts to distrust by automatically inducing the consideration of incongruent associations—it seems designed to ask, “and what if the information were false?” The theoretical implications of the results for theories of social perception and persuasion are discussed. Deception and its complement, distrust, are among the most perplexing and pervasive challenges of social life. Evolutionary theory assumes they are inherent to living in groups and a key problem of adaptation (Griffin, 1992). The social psychological literature on the “epidemiology” of deception and distrust offers much empirical support at least in respect to prevalence. For example, DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer, and Epstein (1996) found that participants in a community survey said they lied in about one of five social interactions, and college students reported doing so in one of three (see also, DePaulo & Kashy, 1998; Feldman, Forrest, & Happ, 2002). Distrust and suspicion seem no less common within and among organizations (Kramer, 1999; Lewicki, McAllister, & Bies, 1998); it is well known that consumers often distrust information put out by these organizations, especially when it is about their products (e.g., Dyer & Kuehl, 1978; Tellis, 1997). The view that “politicians pander” is not uncommon (McGraw, Lodge, & Jones, 2002), and even journalists, admitting that business pressures unduly influence what they write, have become concerned that readers are growing to distrust them (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 1999). Hence, it seems reasonable to conclude that in many, if not most, of their dealings with others, people are aware of the possibility of being misled (DePaulo et al., 1996; Schul & Burnstein, 1998). Our research examines how the human cognitive system has adapted to this sort of awareness. Specifically, it explores whether a feeling of

Our research explores predictions that people make in a simple environment consisting of sequences of a binary signal followed by two possible outcomes. In order to optimize their prediction success, respondents should use a very simple decision rule, called maximization, whereby they consistently predict according to the signal. In line with past research, our findings show that even respondents who realized after the experiment that maximization is optimal failed to use it during the experiment itself. We discuss conditions that weaken or reinforce behaving according to the optimal rule in a repeated choice situation. Experiment 1 shows that individuals who are forced to plan their strategy and justify their actions are more likely to discover and use the optimal rule than those not forced to do so. Thinking about the appropriateness of one’s performance can be done in two different orientations: focusing on the past (justifying past actions) or on the future (planning future action). Experiment 2 shows that planning induces rule-base thinking, while justifying fails to do so. These findings are discussed within a theoretical framework which suggest an interplay between the experiential and the rational modes of processing. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study explores whether and how judgment procedures used in evaluating product information are modified after consumers have found that information they had received in the past was invalid. It shows that, following exposure to invalidating messages, respondents tend to switch their dominant mode of processing. In particular, those who focused on the source in making a judgment prior to invalidation (i.e., those using simple processing) switch to a more complex processing of the product information. In contrast, those who previously relied on product information simplify their processing and consider information they have about the source in making judgments. The results are consistent with a cognitive resource explanation that attributes switch in processing mode to the enhanced cognitive demands imposed by attempts to cope with the invalidation.

Past research has demonstrated that the psychological state of observers influences how they view others. This influence often has been termed “projection.” The current study explores projection in close relationships of cohabiting partners. In Study 1a, structural equation modeling revealed a significant component of projection when spouses reported on the depressive symptoms of their partners. In Study 1b, the same analysis was expanded to include spouses’ reports on a variety of affective states, attitudes, and behaviors of their partners. It was demonstrated that the degree of projection increases with the increase in the magnitude of the correlation between the self-views of the spouses. A cognitive process that accounts for this finding is proposed, along with a view of projection as a heuristic device rather than a bias.

Social interactions often involve attempts to deal with information that is known to be invalid while at the same time using information that is known to be valid. To explore this process, we compare the success of discounting when the source of the to-be-ignored message also provides valid information with a case in which the to-be-used and the to-be-ignored messages are provided by different sources. It is found that when attempting to ignore invalid messages, receivers tend to undermine the impact of the valid messages when both types of messages are attributed to the same source. This does not happen when the valid and invalid messages are attributed to different sources. The study explores several mechanisms that may lead to this effect. It appears that ignoring one message undermines receivers' ability to use another message from the same source because of the associative links that are formed between the valid and the invalid messages.

The paper examines how goal framing (i.e. formulating the decision problem in terms of acceptance vs. rejection) interacts with the quantity of information to determine judgment and choice. We trace the interaction between goal framing and information quantity to the effect of frames on the weight associated with positive and negative information. In three experiments we show that as the quantity of information increases, the differences in choice (Experiments 1 and 3) and judgment (Experiment 2) between accept and reject frames increase as well.

Subjects in two experiments performed a novel task. They were given a performance standard either before or after performance. Half the subjects were given performance feedback indicating that performance exceeded the standard (i.e., success); the other half were given performance feedback indicating that performance was below the standard (i.e., failure). The findings indicate that the timing of the presentation of the standard influences the affective reaction to performance. Subjects who received the standard after performance were more satisfied (in the success condition) or more dissatisfied (in the failure condition) than those who received the standard prior to performance. Experiment 2 also included variations in the timing of the presentation of the standard and in the feedback following performance. No systematic differences were found between these conditions. Implications of these findings of models of performance evaluation are discussed.

Reports the results of the JOBS II randomized field experiment that included a sample of 1,801 recent job losers, 671 of which participated in a modified version of the JOBS I intervention for unemployed workers (Caplan, Vinokur, Price, & van Ryn, 1989). The intervention focused on enhancing the sense of mastery through the acquisition of job-search and problem-solving skills, and on inoculation against setbacks. JOBS II was intended to prevent poor mental health and to promote high quality reemployment. The study tested whether the efficacy of the intervention could be increased by screening and oversampling respondents who were at higher risk for a significant increase in depressive symptoms. Results demonstrated that the intervention primarily benefited the reemployment and mental health outcomes of the high-risk respondents. This suggests the feasibility of enhancing the efficacy of this preventive intervention by targeting it for high-risk unemployed workers who could be identified prospectively.

In this study, we explore the cognitive process by which people evaluate consumer products. We examine how people's information about good and bad product classes influences the evaluation of product exemplars. Subjects in three experiments learned what constitutes a good alloy (the good standard) and a bad alloy (the bad standard). Then they were exposed to a series of exemplars whose features partially overlapped with the good and the bad standards. In the first two experiments, features associated with the good standard had a greater impact on judgment than features associated with the bad standard. This positive/ negative asymmetry was stronger when the decision was framed positively (e.g., how good is this alloy) than when it was framed negatively (e.g., how bad is this product). Also, the asymmetry was stronger when the standards had to be accessed from memory than when they were visually available at the time subjects evaluated the exemplars. In the third experiment, the addition of features that signaled the absence of good characteristics had more influence on product evaluations than the addition of features that signaled the absence of bad characteristics. Implications of these findings for current models of evaluative judgment are discussed.

People often have difficulties ignoring (or discounting) a piece of information once they have learned it, even when they discover later that it is completely invalid. This study explores whether people who are warned, prior to receiving the information, that some of the information they are about to receive is invalid, can prepare for discounting, and consequently can discount more successfully. The results suggests that (1) early warning improves success of discounting only if people are reminded about the warning at the time they process the information, and (2) once reminded about the warning, people take more time to process the information. Thus, people do not prepare to receive invalid information by reducing the extent of elaborative encoding. Rather, they behave as if they generate counter-scenarios or alternative accounts of the information. Several alternative processes that may facilitate successful discounting are discussed.

We propose that experience of emotion is a mental phenomenon, which requires resources. This hypothesis implies that a concurrent cognitive load diminishes the intensity of feeling since the 2 activities are competing for the same resources. Two sets of experiments tested this hypothesis. The first line of experiments (Experiments 1-4) examined the intensity of participants' feelings as they performed a secondary (backward counting) task. The results showed that the intensity of both negative and positive feelings diminished under a cognitive load and that this attenuation of feeling was not mediated by either distraction from external stimuli or demand characteristics. In the second set of experiments (Experiments 5-6), load was created by asking the participants to focus on the feelings. Even in these circumstances, the participants who were under load reported a lower intensity of feeling than those who were not under load. We explain these findings in terms of a resource-dependent model of emotional experience. Possible implications of our findings for a broader class of phenomenological experiences are succinctly discussed.

The study examines how 1) the level of mvolvement and 2) the strength of productrelated attitudes consumers hold determine lomtly the effectiveness of message claims and source credlblhty It 1s shown that these factors interact m determining the effectiveness of message quality When mdlvlduals hold weak related attitudes high mvolvement enhances message effectiveness However, when they hold strong related attitudes high mvolvement detracts from message effectiveness Involvement also moderates the Joint effectiveness of source credlblhty and message quality Under low mvolvement consumers use the source as a simple acceptance or reJection rule and it 1s considered independently of the message When mvolvement 1s high, the source provides the context for the Interpretation of the message and thus an interactive effect was expected

This study explores the relationships between expectations that individuals hold prior to their performance, assessments of the performance, and satisfaction with the performance. Past research examined these questions mainly in situations in which individuals knew the quality of their performance at the time they reported their satisfaction with it. In these situations it was found that satisfaction increased with the level of performance but decreased with the level of expectations. Our study explored whether this analysis fits situations in which explicit feedback is not provided, so that performers must assess their own level of performance. Under these conditions satisfaction increased with the level of perceived performance, but did not decrease with the level of expectations. The results point to some general conditions under which expectations have either positive or negative influence on satisfaction. Specifically, as the ambiguity of performance increases and the ambiguity of expectations decrea...

This investigation used a newly developed artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm in which participants were exposed to sequences of stimuli that varied in two dimensions (colours and letters) that were superimposed on each other. Variation within each dimension was determined by a different grammar. The results of two studies strongly suggest that implicit learning in AGL depends on the goal relevance of the to-be-learned dimension. Specifically, when only one of the two stimulus dimensions was relevant for their task (Experiment 1) participants learned the structure underlying the relevant, but not that of the irrelevant dimension. However, when both dimensions were relevant, both structures were learned (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that implicit learning occurs only in dimensions to which we are attuned. Based on the present results and on those of Eitam, Hassin, and Schul (2008) we suggest that focusing on goal relevance may provide new insights into the mechanisms underlying implicit learning.

Is nonconscious goal pursuit useful in novel environments? The prevalent view of automaticity and control implies that an unconscious mode of goal pursuit can only reproduce formerly learned actions, and therefore that its usefulness in novel environments is very limited. Our results demonstrate that this conclusion is not always warranted, as nonconscious goal pursuit facilitated participants' learning of the structure of completely novel environments. Specifically, two experiments, using markedly different implicit-learning paradigms, demonstrated facilitation of implicit learning when the goal of achievement was primed. We propose that nonconscious goal pursuit can facilitate not only reproductive operations, but also productive ones, and that implicit learning is sensitive to the organism's nonconscious goals.

The study investigates the way people use and make sense of negated adjec- tives. Past research showed that by using a negated adjective, instead of an available antonym, one is able to communicate a mitigated sense of that antonym. To illustrate, by saying 'not hot'one can communicate 'nei- ther hot, but not quite cold'. This eect has been termed the mitigation hy- pothesis. Our theoretical analysis suggests that the extent of mitigation should vary as a function of two factors. First, mitigation should be more pronounced for contraries (adjectives that lie on a continuum) than for con- tradictories (adjectives that form a dichotomy); Second, the extent of meaning mitigation of marked adjectives should be stronger than that of un- marked adjectives. Finally, we hypothesized that these two factors interact, so that the markedness eect should be stronger for contraries than for con- tradictories. We report results from three experiments that tested these hypotheses with native speakers of Hebrew and discuss alternative mecha- nisms that might lead to mitigation of negated terms. We also address the practical importance of our findings for questionnaire design and communication. 1. The meaning of negated adjectives Negations are prevalent in communication. Mehl and Pennebaker (2003) analyzed natural conversations of students and found that negations were slightly more prevalent than words connoting positive emotions, two times more frequent than words connoting negative emotions, and almost three times more prevalent than words used to denote causality. This oc- curs in spite of findings which show that processing negations is often harder, slower, and more error-prone than processing a‰rmations (e.g., Carpenter & Just 1975; Clark & Chase 1972; Just & Clark 1973; Lea &

Individuals appear to be more successful in discounting invalid evidence in studies which are set in courtroom settings than in studies done in the belief perseverance paradigm. Several differences between the two paradigms may explain this pattern. Most of these differences are ruled out by past research. We focused on differences in two domains, namely, encoding of the information and strength of the discounting appeals, and manipulated them experimentally. Even though the two manipulations were effective in influencing other judgments, they had no effect on success of discounting with guilt judgments. As in previous studies done within the courtroom paradigm, subjects were successful in discounting invalid evidence. Our interpretation for these findings involves the active process of discounting. Specifically, we assume that court settings activate a schema that leads people to deliberately correct for potential biases on the relevant guilt judgments. Since other judgments are less central within the court schema, they are not monitored actively and consequently are more susceptible to the effects of an invalid testimony.

Two types of discounting appeals were tested for effectiveness: an ignore appeal asks consumers to disregard a previously communicated claim because it may not be valid; a refute appeal specifically states that the challenged claim is incorrect. Results from two experiments indicate that the impact of the two appeals on consumer decision making depends on the elaboration the message underwent during encoding. Impact is also mediated by the extent to which a discounting cue provides counterinformation about a product and signals are interpretations of nonchallenged claims. Refute appeals are more effective due to their specificity and strength. Copyright 1990 by the University of Chicago.

Barbey & Sloman (B&S) advocate a dual-process (two-system) approach by comparing it with an alternative perspective (ecological rationality), claiming that the latter is unwarranted. Rejecting this alternative approach cannot serve as sufficient evidence for the viability of the former.

Structural equation modeling analyses of data from 2 longitudinal community studies of recently laid-off workers examined the interrelationships and pathways from personal coping resources to job-search intensity and the extent and quality of reemployment at 2 follow-ups (at 6 months and at 12 or 24 months). In both studies, the proposed models for predicting reemployment and reemployment quality provided a good fit to the data with the same pattern of results, which demonstrated that job-search motivation increased reemployment at all follow-ups but did not affect reemployment quality. At both the 6- and 12-month follow-ups, level of depressive symptoms decreased the extent and quality of reemployment. The results also highlighted the dual role of financial strain, which on the one hand facilitates reemployment by increasing job-search motivation and job-search intensity and on the other hand inhibits it by increasing depressive symptoms.

The present research contrasts two seemingly complementary decision strategies: acceptance and elimination. In acceptance, a choice set is created by including suitable alternatives from an initial set of alternatives, whereas in elimination it is created by removing inappropriate alternatives from that same initial set. The research used realistic career decision-making scenarios and presented to respondents sets of alternatives that varied in their preexperimental strength values. Whereas complementarity of acceptance and elimination is implied by three standard (normative) assumptions of decision theory, we find a systematic discrepancy between the outcomes of these procedures: choice sets were larger in elimination than in acceptance. This acceptance-elimination discrepancy is directly tied to subcomplementarity. The central tenet of the theoretical framework developed here is that acceptance and elimination procedures imply different types of status quo for the alternatives, thereby invoking a different selection criterion for each procedure. A central prediction of the dual-criterion framework is that middling alternatives should be most susceptible to the type of procedure used. The present studies focus on this prediction which is substantiated by the results showing that middling alternatives yield the greatest discrepancy between acceptance and elimination. The implications of this model and findings for various research domains are discussed. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

The study explored the process through which customers assess their satisfaction with service organizations. Our theoretical analysis suggests that when a general satisfaction question appears after questions about specific domains were asked (SG order), the earlier questions increase the accessibility of both positive and negative information. In contrast, when a general satisfaction question appears prior to any other question (GS order), negative information is more accessible than positive information. On the basis of these differences in accessibility we predicted (1) greater asymmetry in the impact of positive and negative information on the general satisfaction response in the GS order, (2) higher correspondence between domain-specific satisfaction and general satisfaction in the SG order, and (3) higher levels of general satisfaction in the SG order. These predictions were supported in analyses of customers' responses in a national survey of satisfaction with the Israel Telecommunication Corporation (Bezeq).

In making a new judgment, a person can access relevant past judgments and/ or process the stimulus information underlying these judgments. The present study is concerned with (i) the conditions under which past judgments are used instead of stimulus information and (ii) the effects that repeated past judgments have on the representation of the stimulus information in memory. Three experiments were conducted using an impression formation task. Subjects were presented with trait descriptions of hypothetical individuals and were asked to make one, three, or five impression judgments on the basis of each description. It was hypothesized that a new impression will tend to be based on an old one, rather than on trait information, as a function of the ease with which the new impression can be inferred from the old. Ease of inference, in turn, will depend on the similarity of the two impressions and the availability of the past impression. The results of the three studies are consistent with this hypothesis: When past judgments were available, (Expermints 1 and 3), the extent to which they, rather than the trait information, determined the present judgment increased with the similarity between them. However, when another activity interpolated between the old and the new judgments (Experiment 2), thus making the past judgment more dimcult to access, the tendency to use the latter diminished considerably. Afterjudging, subjects were given a surprise recognition test for the trait information. Recognition accuracy was superior following a series of related judgments than

This study investigates the encoding and retrieval of arguments in an opinion formation task. It is based on a model of opinion formation that partitions the latter process into initial encoding, elaborative encoding, integration, and decision. According to this model elaborative encoding depends on two factors: (i) the informativeness of the arguments and (ii) their thematic relatedness. Since it is reasonably well established that the likelihood of retrieving an argument is an increasing function of the amount of elaboration performed on it, the first hypothesis is straightforward, namely, that the memory for an argument will increase with its informativeness and with its thematic relatedness to other arguments. The second hypothesis assumes that by dint of their closer association with the decision, informative arguments occupy a more central position in the representation of an opinion than uninformative ones. This implies that an informative argument should be accessed and reported prior to an uninformative argument, even when differences in retrievability (i.e., probabilities of recall) are controlled. The findings were consistent with such an analysis.

The present study focused on the relationships between therapists' preferences and expectations with regard to their own and their clients' role behaviors. Fifty therapists completed the Role Expectations and Preferences Questionnaire before entering 147 counseling sessions with clients. It was found that therapists' preferences differ from their expectations. This was more pronounced with regard to clients' behaviors than to therapists' role behaviors. Both preferences and expectations changed over time in therapy, but, contrary to hypothesis, the preferences-expectations gap did not decrease over time. The overall pattern of results indicated that preferences-expectations discrepancies reflect the therapists' assessment of the clients' willingness and/or ability to behave in ways prescribed by the therapists' theoretical orientation. The paper suggests that future research consider the time-related aspects of role preferences and expectations and the consequences of preferences-expectations gap.

The study examines how the relevance and the amount of knowledge affect the time needed to make stimulus-based and memory-based judgments. Predictions about these effects are derived by considering the impact of these characteristics of stimulus information on the cognitive operations performed during the judgments. Results from two experiments indicate that (a) both types of judgments were facilitated when the information underlying the judgment was relevant; (b) the effect of the amount of information was more pronounced in stimulus-based than in memory-based judgments; and (c) the amount and relevance of the information interacted in determining the speed of both types of judgments. Experiment 2 further suggests that stimulus- and memory-based judgments were more extreme when they were based on three relevant traits than when based on a single relevant trait. This “set-size” effect did not occur, however, when the trait information was irrelevant. The analyses of the judgment responses and latencies make it unlikely that individuals ignored the stimulus information completely or utilized only part of it in making their memory-based judgments. Rather, it appears that in the present study the representation of the stimulus information was activated during memory-based judgments as a single unit and was utilized as the basis of the judgment. These findings are discussed in light of several alternative processing models of memory-based judgments.

The representation of trait descriptions in memory depends not only on the properties of this information (e.g., whether it is consistent) but also on the operations performed on it (e.g., whether it has been integrated). If a set of traits merely has to be comprehended without being integrated (called a discrere judgment), then an inconsistent set is processed just as readily as a consistent one. However, if integration is required, that is, a coherent impression must be formed (called an integrative judgmenr), consistent trait descriptions are processed more rapidly than inconsistent ones. The effect of such differences in processing on the representation was shown in recognition memory performance: First, following integrative judgment a trait description was more accessible than following a discrete judgment. Second, under integrative judgment, memory for a consistent trait description was no greater than that for an inconsistent description, whereas under discrete judgment, memory for the former was superior to that for the latter. This suggests that when an impression is formed, namely, under integrative judgment, the traits describing a person are associated with each other via prior knowledge, and thus are represented as a unified structure; otherwise each trait is stored as a separate piece of information.