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Public attitudes about climate policy are shaped by social identities, norms, and other sociocultural factors. Recent research demonstrates the impact of cues from policy makers and other political elites on support for climate policies, and the processes by which elite cues perpetuate political polarization. Elite cues convey information about social norms that influence people’s attitudes about climate policy. This can lead to people supporting or opposing climate policy beyond effects of ideology and climate concern. Elites also shape emotional tones of political issues, which can promote affective polarization and can motivate intergroup conflict. Despite emerging norms that climate change is an urgent issue requiring immediate action, the influence of political elites may polarize and pose barriers to climate action. As public concern about climate change increases, the public may look away from polarized elites and towards alternative emerging leaders who can reduce polarized public attitudes about climate change.

Citizen activists play a role in translating public concern about the climate crisis to policymakers and elevating it on the political agenda. We consider the dynamic between citizen activists and the decision-makers they seek to influence and we review psychological research relevant to advocating for climate legislation. We conducted a study with citizen activists who lobby the US Congress for a carbon pricing policy to address climate change. The study assessed how activists think about four social psychological approaches: affirmation, social norms, legacy and immediacy. The findings provide a window into activists’ intuitions about which strategies to use, whom to use them with and their perceived effectiveness. A strategy of establishing shared values and common ground (affirmation) was used most frequently overall. A strategy emphasizing the long-term costs and benefits of addressing climate change (legacy) was employed less frequently than affirmation and seen as less effective by activists but it was the only strategy that was associated with perceived increases in Congressional Representatives’ support of the policy. Citizen activists and their interactions with elected officials provide an opportunity for social-behavioral scientists to understand and potentially overcome barriers to enacting climate policy.

Global climate change is the largest existential threat of our time. Glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, extreme weather is intensifying and the last four years have been the hottest on record (NASA, 2020; World Meteorological Organization, 2020). Although climate change is already significantly impacting natural and human systems around the world, mitigating further and potentially disastrous climate change will require large-scale individual and collective action, including public support for mitigation policies, as well as the more rapid development and implementation of adaptation plans (van der Linden et al., 2015; Pearson et al., 2016).

We propose and support a salience explanation of exposure effects. We suggest that repeated exposure to stimuli influences evaluations by increasing salience, the relative quality of standing out from other competing stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we manipulated exposure, presenting some stimuli 9 times and other stimuli 3 times, 1 time, or 0 times, as in previous mere exposure research. Exposure increased liking, replicating previous research (Zajonc, 1968), and increased salience, made evaluations more extreme, and made stimuli more emotionally intense. Across experiments, results of multiple mediation models and a causal chain of experiments supported the idea that salience explains these exposure effects. Fluency and apprehension, 2 constructs that have been invoked to explain mere exposure, accounted for less of these effects according to the mediation models and the chain of experiments. We next manipulated relative exposure and absolute exposure orthogonally, finding that relative exposure increases liking more than absolute exposure. Stimuli presented 9 times were liked more when other stimuli in the context were presented less than 9 times than when the other stimuli were presented more than 9 times (Experiment 4). Whereas absolute exposure had no significant effect in Experiment 4, relative exposure increased liking, extremity, and emotional intensity. In Experiment 5, a direct manipulation of salience increased liking, evaluative extremity, and emotional intensity. These results suggest that salience partially explains effects previously attributed to absolute "mere" exposure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

People transcend the present through retrospection and prospection. These forms of mental time travel entail different psychological processes and outcomes. Three axiomatic differences between the past and the future characterize the psychology of mental time travel: (1) time has an apparent direction from the past to the future (Direction); (2) people are more uncertain about the future than the past (Uncertainty); and (3) people have more control over the future than the past (Control). These axiomatic differences orient people towards the future, in service of functional strategies for attention allocation. In a large, diverse sample in the United States, most people attended more to the future than the past, represented the future as closer than the past, and reported stronger emotional reactions to the future than the past. These asymmetries contribute to a tendency for those who attend more to the future versus the past to experience greater subjective well-being.

Significance Political polarization impeded public support for policies to address the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other societal challenges. The present cross-country study demonstrates how the cues from political elites and affective polarization are analogous across countries addressing COVID-19. Far from being an outlier, the United States faces polarization challenges similar to those of other countries. Importantly, the results demonstrate that policies to combat public health crises are more supported when proposed by nonpartisan experts and bipartisan coalitions of political leaders. These results provide clear guidance on depolarizing communication strategies to improve global responses to health crises., Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in seven countries (n = 12,955): Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across countries, cues from political elites polarized public attitudes toward COVID-19 policies. Liberal and conservative respondents supported policies proposed by ingroup politicians and parties more than the same policies from outgroup politicians and parties. Respondents disliked, distrusted, and felt cold toward outgroup political elites, whereas they liked, trusted, and felt warm toward both ingroup political elites and nonpartisan experts. This affective polarization was correlated with policy support. These findings imply that policies from bipartisan coalitions and nonpartisan experts would be less polarizing, enjoying broader public support. Indeed, across countries, policies from bipartisan coalitions and experts were more widely supported. A follow-up experiment replicated these findings among US respondents considering international vaccine distribution policies. The polarizing effects of partisan elites and affective polarization emerged across nations that vary in cultures, ideologies, and political systems. Contrary to some propositions, the United States was not exceptionally polarized. Rather, these results suggest that polarizing processes emerged simply from categorizing people into political ingroups and outgroups. Political elites drive polarization globally, but nonpartisan experts can help resolve the conflicts that arise from it.

People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, Yet their behavior often increases others’ health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts others’ health risks. We expected structured reflection to increase people's intentions and decisions to reduce others’ health risks. Structured reflection increases attention to others’ health risks and the correspondence between people's personal criteria and behavioral intentions. In four experiments during COVID-19, people (N = 12,995) reported their personal criteria about how much specific attributes, including the impact on others’ health risks, should influence their behavior. Compared with control conditions, people who engaged in structured reflection reported greater intentions to reduce business capacity (experiment 1) and avoid large social gatherings (experiments 2 and 3). They also donated more to provide vaccines to refugees (experiment 4). These effects emerged across seven countries that varied in collectivism and COVID-19 case rates (experiments 1 and 2). Structured reflection was distinct from instructions to carefully deliberate (experiment 3). Structured reflection increased the correlation between personal criteria and behavioral intentions (experiments 1 and 3). And structured reflection increased donations more among people who scored lower in cognitive reflection compared with those who scored higher in cognitive reflection (experiment 4). These findings suggest that structured reflection can effectively increase behaviors to reduce public health risks.

Most people in the United States recognize the reality of climate change and are concerned about its consequences, yet climate change is a low priority relative to other policy issues. Recognizing that belief in climate change does not necessarily translate to prioritizing climate policy, we examine psychological factors that may boost or inhibit prioritization. We hypothesized that perceived social norms from people’s own political party influence their climate policy prioritization beyond their personal belief in climate change. In Study 1, a large, diverse sample of Democratic and Republican participants (N = 887) reported their prioritization of climate policy relative to other issues. Participants’ perceptions of their political ingroup’s social norms about climate policy prioritization were the strongest predictor of personal climate policy prioritization—stronger even than participants’ belief in climate change, political orientation, environmental identity, and environmental values. Perceptions of political outgroup norms did not predict prioritization. In Study 2 (N = 217), we experimentally manipulated Democratic and Republican descriptive norms of climate policy prioritization. Participants’ prioritization of climate policy was highest when both the political ingroup and the outgroup prioritized climate policy. Ingroup norms had a strong influence on personal policy prioritization whereas outgroup norms did not. These findings demonstrate that, beyond personal beliefs and other individual differences, ingroup social norms shape the public’s prioritization of climate change as a policy issue.

Two experiments examined the polarization of public support for COVID-19 policies due to people’s (lack of) trust in political leaders and nonpartisan experts. In diverse samples in the United States (Experiment 1; N = 1,802) and the United Kingdom (Experiment 2; N = 1,825), participants evaluated COVID-19 policies that were framed as proposed by ingroup political leaders, outgroup political leaders, nonpartisan experts, or, in the United States, a bipartisan group of political leaders. At the time of the study in April 2020, COVID-19 was an unfamiliar and shared threat. Therefore, there were theoretical reasons suggesting that attitudes toward COVID-19 policy may not have been politically polarized. Yet, our results demonstrated that even relatively early in the pandemic people supported policies from ingroup political leaders more than the same policies from outgroup leaders, extending prior research on how people align their policy stances to political elites from their own parties. People also trusted experts and ingroup political leaders more than they did outgroup political leaders. Partly because of this polarized trust, policies from experts and bipartisan groups were more widely supported than policies from ingroup political leaders. These results illustrate the potentially detrimental role political leaders may play and the potential for effective leadership by bipartisan groups and nonpartisan experts in shaping public policy attitudes during crises.

Although political polarization in the United States is real, intense, and increasing, partisans consistently overestimate its magnitude. This ‘false polarization’ is insidious because it reinforces actual polarization and inhibits compromise. We review empirical research on false polarization and the related phenomenon of negative meta-perceptions, and we propose three cognitive and affective processes that likely contribute to these phenomena: categorical thinking, oversimplification, and emotional amplification. Finally, we review several interventions that have shown promise in mitigating these biases.

The adoption of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies at a scale sufficient to draw down carbon emissions will require both individual and collective decisions that happen over time in different locations to enable a massive scale-up. Members of the public and other decision-makers have not yet formed strong attitudes, beliefs and preferences about most of the individual CDR technologies or taken positions on policy mechanisms and tax-payer support for CDR. Much of the current discourse among scientists, policy analysts and policy-makers about CDR implicitly assumes that decision-makers will exhibit unbiased, rational behaviour that weighs the costs and benefits of CDR. In this paper, we review behavioural decision theory and discuss how public reactions to CDR will be different from and more complex than that implied by rational choice theory. Given that people do not form attitudes and opinions in a vacuum, we outline how fundamental social normative principles shape important intergroup, intragroup and social network processes that influence support for or opposition to CDR technologies. We also point to key insights that may help stakeholders craft public outreach strategies that anticipate the nuances of how people evaluate the risks and benefits of CDR approaches. Finally, we outline critical research questions to understand the behavioural components of CDR to plan for an emerging public response.

The authors suggest that mere attention increases the perceived severity of environmental risks because attention increases the fear and distinctiveness of attended risks. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were exposed to images of multiple environmental risks, with attention repeatedly oriented to a subset of these risks. Participants subsequently perceived attended risks to be more severe, more frightening, higher priority, and more distinctive than control risks. In Experiments 3 and 4, spatial cueing manipulations were used to briefly draw attention toward some risks and away from others. In Experiment 3, a briefly flashed rectangle drew attention toward one side of a computer screen just before 2 images depicting different risks appeared: 1 image near to where the rectangle appeared and 1 further away. In Experiment 4, incidental attention was cued toward some risks by giving participants an unrelated letter search task that required them to briefly attend near that location. Participants in Experiments 3 and 4 selected cued (attended) risks as more severe, distinctive, and frightening than noncued risks. Across experiments, serial mediation analyses indicated that the effect of the attention manipulation on severity was mediated by the effect of attention on fear which was mediated by distinctiveness. Across experiments, we equated duration of exposure to risks and sought to minimize demand characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

There is emerging evidence that emotional states can influence human decision making under uncertainty. However, it remains unclear if and how emotions influence people’ ability to recogniz...

Gilead et al. present a rich account of abstraction. Though the account describes several elements which influence mental representation, it is worth also delineating how feelings, such as fluency and emotion, influence mental simulation. Additionally, though past experience can sometimes make simulations more accurate and worthwhile (as Gilead et al. suggest), many systematic prediction errors persist despite substantial experience.

The authors acknowledge and respond to three concerns raised by Weber (2018) about oversimplifying psychological barriers to climate policy. First, skepticism about climate change remains a major barrier to climate policy, along with political partisanship. Second, recognizing multifaceted barriers to climate policy calls for multiple targeted interventions to be implemented at critical junctures. Finally, translating pro-environmental attitudes into action requires an appreciation of proximate sociopolitical contexts and cultures. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, psychological scientists are well equipped to understand and address the complex barriers to climate policy within the natural flow of everyday social life.

Everyday partisans evaluate policies partly by following partisan cues, fomenting polarization. However, there is debate over the influence of partisan cues in “real-world,” nonlaboratory contexts. An experiment with a real climate change initiative in the 2016 Washington State election tested whether partisan cues influenced climate policy polarization. In a primary study, 504 prospective voters were randomly assigned to view veridical policy endorsements by partisan elites; this study was followed by a preregistered conceptual replication ( N = 1,178). Democrats supported the climate policy more than Republicans. But this difference was greater when Democrats endorsed the policy (with Republican opposition) than when Republicans endorsed the policy (with Democratic opposition). Neither knowledge nor belief in climate change reduced these polarizing effects, and greater policy knowledge was associated with increased polarization. Further, the effect of partisan cues on normative perceptions mediated the effect of partisan cues on policy support.

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats’ and Republicans’ polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N= 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for psychology, political science, and the future of democratic society.

Recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence and data analytics are facilitating the automation of some consumer chores (e.g., in smart homes and in self-driving cars) and allow the emergence of big-data-driven, micro-targeting marketing practices (e.g., personalized content recommendation algorithms). We contend that those developments can generate a tension for marketers, consumers, and policy makers: They can, on the one hand, contribute to consumer well-being by making consumer choices easier, more practical, and more efficient. On the other hand, they can also undermine consumers’ sense of autonomy, the absence of which can be detrimental to consumer well-being. Drawing on diverse perspectives from marketing, economics, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, we explore how consumers’ sense of autonomy in making choices affects their well-being. We discuss how new technologies may enhance or diminish consumers’ perceptions of being in control of their choices and how either of those can, in turn, enhance of detract from consumer well-being. Building on this, we identify open research questions in the domain of choice, well-being, and consumer welfare, and suggest avenues for future research.

Attention and emotion are fundamental psychological systems. It is well established that emotion intensifies attention. Three experiments reported here ( N = 235) demonstrated the reversed causal direction: Voluntary visual attention intensifies perceived emotion. In Experiment 1, participants repeatedly directed attention toward a target object during sequential search. Participants subsequently perceived their emotional reactions to target objects as more intense than their reactions to control objects. Experiments 2 and 3 used a spatial-cuing procedure to manipulate voluntary visual attention. Spatially cued attention increased perceived emotional intensity. Participants perceived spatially cued objects as more emotionally intense than noncued objects even when participants were asked to mentally rehearse the name of noncued objects. This suggests that the intensifying effect of attention is independent of more extensive mental rehearsal. Across experiments, attended objects were perceived as more visually distinctive, which statistically mediated the effects of attention on emotional intensity.

Supplemental material, VanBoven_OpenPracticesDisclosure_rev for Attention Drives Emotion: Voluntary Visual Attention Increases Perceived Emotional Intensity by Kellen Mrkva, Jacob Westfall and Leaf Van Boven in Psychological Science

Group polarization occurs when people's attitudes become more extreme following discussion with like-minded others. We hypothesized that people underestimate how much a relatively brief group discussion polarizes their own attitudes. People often perceive their own attitudes as unbiased and stable over time. Therefore, people's polarized post-discussion attitudes may cause them to misremember their pre-discussion attitudes as having been more extreme than they were. In two experiments, participants engaged in 15-minute discussions with 4–6 like-minded others regarding two political topics: whether Barack Obama or George W. Bush was the better president (Experiment 1) and whether they supported Barack Obama or Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election (Experiment 2). Group discussion polarized participants' attitudes, and participants misremembered their pre-discussion attitudes as having been more extreme than they actually were. Participants' polarized post-discussion attitudes significantly predicted their recalled pre-discussion attitudes, controlling for their actual pre-discussion attitudes, suggesting that their post-discussion attitudes guided reconstruction of their pre-discussion attitudes. These findings have implications for people's awareness of psychological biases and for the societal effects of partisan enclavement.

Psychological scientists have the expertise—and arguably an obligation—to help understand the political polarization that impedes enactment of climate policy. Many explanations emphasize Republican skepticism about climate change. Yet results from national panel studies in 2014 and 2016 indicate that most Republicans believe in climate change, if not as strongly as Democrats. Political polarization over climate policy does not simply reflect that Democrats and Republicans disagree about climate change but that Democrats and Republicans disagree with each other. The results of a national panel experiment and of in-depth interviews with four former members of Congress suggest that Democrats and Republicans—both ordinary citizens and policymakers—support policies from their own party and reactively devalue policies from the opposing party. These partisan evaluations occur both for policies historically associated with liberal principles and politicians (cap-and-trade) and for policies associated with conservative principles and politicians (revenue-neutral carbon tax). People also exaggerate how much other Democrats and Republicans are swayed by partisanship. This foments false norms of partisan opposition that, in turn, influence people’s personal policy support. Correcting misperceived norms of opposition and decoupling policy evaluation from identity concerns would help overcome these seemingly insurmountable barriers to bipartisan support for climate policy.

Policies to suppress rare events such as terrorism often restrict co-occurring categories such as Muslim immigration. Evaluating restrictive policies requires clear thinking about conditional probabilities. For example, terrorism is extremely rare. So even if most terrorist immigrants are Muslim-a high "hit rate"-the inverse conditional probability of Muslim immigrants being terrorists is extremely low. Yet the inverse conditional probability is more relevant to evaluating restrictive policies such as the threat of terrorism if Muslim immigration were restricted. We suggest that people engage in partisan evaluation of conditional probabilities, judging hit rates as more important when they support politically prescribed restrictive policies. In two studies, supporters of expelling asylum seekers from Tel Aviv, Israel, of banning Muslim immigration and travel to the United States, and of banning assault weapons judged "hit rate" probabilities (e.g., that terrorists are Muslims) as more important than did policy opponents, who judged the inverse conditional probabilities (e.g., that Muslims are terrorists) as more important. These partisan differences spanned restrictive policies favored by Rightists and Republicans (expelling asylum seekers and banning Muslim travel) and by Democrats (banning assault weapons). Inviting partisans to adopt an unbiased expert's perspective partially reduced these partisan differences. In Study 2 (but not Study 1), partisan differences were larger among more numerate partisans, suggesting that numeracy supported motivated reasoning. These findings have implications for polarization, political judgment, and policy evaluation. Even when partisans agree about what the statistical facts are, they markedly disagree about the relevance of those statistical facts.

Why do some events feel "like yesterday" whereas others feel "ages away"? Past research has identified cues that influence people's estimates of distance in units such as how many miles or days away events are from the self. However, what makes events feel psychologically close or distant? We examine the hypothesis that increased simulational fluency, the ease with which people mentally imagine events, makes events feel psychologically close. Simulational fluency was associated with feelings that multiple past and future holidays were psychologically close (Studies 1a and 1b). Writing short, easy-to-generate descriptions of Christmas made it feel psychologically closer and more fluently simulated compared with writing longer, difficult-to-generate descriptions (Study 2). This pattern was not anticipated by readers of the same content who did not directly experience the fluency of writing descriptions. Writing descriptions of Halloween made it feel fluently simulated and psychologically close, even as concrete "how" descriptions reduced construal level compared with abstract "why" descriptions (Study 3). Listening to a fluent audio description of a past Super Bowl, compared with a disfluent audio description, caused the game to feel psychologically closer in both space and time (Study 4). Reading a description of the Super Bowl in easy-to-read font, compared with difficult-to-read font, made the game feel more fluently simulated and psychologically closer (Study 5). These findings have implications for theories of psychological distance and its role in everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record

Supplemental material, VanBoven_Supplemental_Material for Psychological Barriers to Bipartisan Public Support for Climate Policy by Leaf Van Boven, Phillip J. Ehret, and David K. Sherman in Perspectives on Psychological Science

Supplemental Material, SPPS758709_suppl_mat for Partisan Barriers to Bipartisanship: Understanding Climate Policy Polarization by Phillip J. Ehret, Leaf Van Boven, and David K. Sherman in Social Psychological and Personality Science

What is psychological distance? Why do events sometimes seem “close” yet other times seem “ages away?” We propose a tripartite model of the foundations of psychological distance in which: (a) people use spatial distance as a metaphor for psychological distance; (b) the ecology of subjective experiences that coincide with changes in objective distance define, and hence, influence psychological distance; (c) psychological distance is shaped in the service of people's ultimate goals, or teleological considerations, of successfully navigating through time. This model implies that the subjective experiences that are typically associated with reductions in objective temporal distance should reduce temporal psychological distance–the subjective sense of how close or far away events are. We review evidence indicating that emotional arousal, attention, fluency, and motivational considerations all reduce psychological distance. This model also implies a temporal asymmetry in which people prioritize thinking about the future, which approaches in time, over thinking about the past, which recedes in time. Consequently, the future is psychologically closer than the past, people attend more to the future than to the past, and people feel more emotionally aroused about the future than about the past. These findings help advance understanding of psychological distance as a distinct psychological construct.

Too often, people fail to prioritize the most important activities, life domains, and budget categories. One reason for misplaced priorities, we argue, is that activities and categories people have frequently or recently attended to seem higher priority than other activities and categories. In Experiment 1, participants were cued to direct voluntary spatial attention toward 1 side of a screen while images depicting different budget categories were presented: 1 category on the cued side and 1 on the noncued side of the screen. Participants rated cued budget categories as higher priority than noncued budget categories. Cued attention also increased perceived distinctiveness, and a mediation model was consistent with the hypothesis that distinctiveness mediates the effect of cued attention on prioritization. Experiment 2 orthogonally manipulated 2 components of a spatial cuing manipulation-heightened visual attention and heightened mental attention-to examine how each influences prioritization. Visual attention and mental attention additively increased prioritization. In Experiment 3, attention increased prioritization even when prioritization decisions were incentivized, and even when heightened attention was isolated from primacy and recency. Across experiments, cued categories were prioritized more than noncued categories even though measures were taken to disguise the purpose of the experiments and manipulate attention incidentally (i.e., as a by-product of an unrelated task). (PsycINFO Database Record

Simulating other people’s difficulties often improves attitudes toward those people. In the case of physical disabilities, however, such experience simulations can backfire. By highlighting the initial challenges of becoming disabled, experience simulations decrease the perceived adaptability of being disabled and reduce the judged capabilities of disabled people. In two experiments, participants engaged in a challenging blindness simulation and afterward judged blind people as less capable of work and independent living than did participants after simulating a different impairment (Experiment 1), no impairment (Experiments 1 and 2), or after merely watching someone else simulate blindness (Experiment 2). Blindness simulators forecast that they would be less capable themselves if blind and that they would adapt to blindness more slowly (Experiment 2), highlighting the self-centered nature of judged capabilities of disabled people. The findings demonstrate that experience simulation can sometimes harm rather than help attitudes toward other people’s difficulties.

Although previous research has shown that helping others leads to higher happiness than helping oneself, people frequently predict that self-serving behavior will make them happier than prosocial behavior. Here, we explore whether abstract construal – thinking about an event from a higher level, distanced perspective – influences predictions about how rewarding prosocial actions will be for people’s own well-being. In Experiment 1, Hurricane Katrina volunteers who adopted an abstract construal predicted that their efforts would be more rewarding than did volunteers who adopted a concrete construal. Experiment 2 provided a conceptual replication with a hypothetical donation scenario; people who adopted an abstract rather than concrete construal predicted that giving more money would be more rewarding than giving less. These findings suggest that people are more likely to appreciate the emotional benefits of prosocial actions when they adopt high-level construals than when they adopt low-level construals.

People often use their own feelings as a basis to predict others' feelings. For example, when trying to gauge how much someone else enjoys a television show, people might think "How much do I enjoy it?" and use this answer as basis for estimating others' reactions. Although personal experience (such as actually watching the show oneself) often improves empathic accuracy, we found that gaining too much experience can impair it. Five experiments highlight a desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking, with consequences for social prediction, social judgment, and social behavior. Participants who viewed thrilling or shocking images many times predicted first-time viewers would react less intensely (Experiments 1 and 2); participants who heard the same funny joke or annoying noise many times estimated less intense reactions of first-time listeners (Experiments 3 and 4); and further, participants were less likely to actually share good jokes and felt less bad about blasting others with annoying noise after they themselves became desensitized to those events (Experiments 3-5). These effects were mediated by participants' own attenuated reactions. Moreover, observers failed to anticipate this bias, believing that overexposed participants (i.e., repeatedly exposed participants who became desensitized) would make better decisions on their behalf (Experiment 5). Taken together, these findings reveal a novel paradox in emotional perspective taking: If people experience an evocative event many times, they may not become wiser companions but worse, unable to disentangle self-change from other-oriented thinking. Just as lacking exposure to others' experiences can create gaps in empathy and understanding, so may gaining too much. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)

Three experiments demonstrate that in the context of U.S. foreign policy decision making, people infer informational quality from secrecy. In Experiment 1, people weighed secret information more heavily than public information when making recommendations about foreign political candidates. In Experiment 2, people judged information presented in documents ostensibly produced by the Department of State and the National Security Council as being of relatively higher quality when those documents were secret rather than public. Finally, in Experiment 3, people judged a National Security Council document as being of higher quality when presented as a secret document rather than a public document and evaluated others' decisions more favorably when those decisions were based on secret information. Discussion centers on the mediators, moderators, and broader implications of this secrecy heuristic in foreign policy contexts.

Consumer researchers have recognized for a long time that people consume in ways that are consistent with their sense of self (Levy 1959; Sirgy 1982). Important thought leaders in our field have described and documented that consumers use possessions and brands to create their self-identities and communicate these selves to others and to themselves (e.g., Belk 1988; Fournier 1998; McCracken 1989). Although early research tended to focus on broad conceptual issues surrounding consumers and their sense of self, recent research takes a more granular approach, breaking down the relationship between identity concerns and consumption to look at the effects of specific self-related goals and of different aspects of self-identity on consumer behavior. For example, why would someone drive his Prius to work but drive his BMW to a blind date? Impression management? Value expression? Need for affiliation? The current collection of articles on self-identity and consumer behavior (appearing over the last two years) complements and adds to a growing body of work that has already appeared in JCR. Five of these six articles focus on specific relationships between self-identity-related goals and consumer behavior, exploring needs such as affiliation and distinctiveness, self-verification, and self-affirmation. The sixth paper explores the effect of identity activation on memory. The experiments in these articles fall into two paradigms. First, researchers threaten an aspect of self-identity to investigate how consumers engage in restorative behavior. In this paradigm, researchers may also allow consumers to bolster an aspect of selfidentity to mitigate the need for self-repair. Second, researchers measure or manipulate (prime) a particular aspect of self-identity or a particular identity-related goal to examine the effect on subsequent consumer behavior. Taken altogether, the papers in this collection provide us with a more nuanced understanding of consumer behavior as it relates to self-identity. While this collection of recent articles moves us forward, the wide variety of self-identity goals and countless aspects of self-identity make this an extremely fruitful area for future research. The first article, by White, Argo, and Sengupta, finds that consumers respond differently to self-threats depending on their self-construal. When independent selves are salient, a threat to the self activates the need to bolster self-worth through dissociation from identity-linked products, lowering preferences for such products. When interdependent selves are active, self-threat activates the need to belong, which manifests itself in an increased association with identity-linked products, enhancing product preferences. These findings persist across many different operationalizations of self-construal. Thus, how consumers restore their sense of self after a threat depends on which self-goal is activated, which in turn depends on the consumers’ self-construal. Next, the article by Townsend and Sood explores how the choice of an aesthetically pleasing product can affirm a consumer’s threatened sense of self. Rather than identify a specific social identity, the researchers link aesthetics to personal values. The choice of a highly aesthetic product can boost one’s self-esteem by confirming one’s value for beauty. The researchers show that the choice of a highly aesthetic product meets consumers’ needs to self-affirm after a self-threat by replicating the positive effects of selfaffirmation on a variety of downstream variables established in psychological research. For example, choosing a well-designed product increased openness to counterarguments and reduced commitment toward a failing course of action. The third article, by Ward and Broniarczyk, also falls into the self-threat paradigm. Here, the threat arises from a naturally occurring consumer setting: gift giving. Identity-incongruent gifts to close friends threaten consumers’ sense of self, while incongruent gifts to distant friends do not. Close friends are

The results of four experiments support the hypothesis that mental time travel is more prototypical in the future tense than in the past tense. That is, prospection more than retrospection is grounded in scripts, schemas, stereotypes, and other prototypical mental representations of what people, places, and events are typically like. People reported that events in prospection rather than retrospection were more similar to each other and more similar to a prototypical event (encounters with homeless people in Experiment 1, ordering pizza in Experiment 2). Because prototypes tend to be abstract, people selected higher levels of action identification during prospection than during retrospection (Experiment 3) an effect that was not moderated by distance. Finally, drawings of future vacations that were generated by one sample of people were judged by a different sample of people, who were unaware of the drawings' tense, as more prototypical compared with drawings of past vacations (Experiment 4). Discussion centers on the underlying explanations of prototypical prospection and on the implications of these temporal asymmetries for theories of psychological distance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The results of three experiments provide evidence that the relative accessibility of stereotypes about sex difference influences people's memory of very recent emotions. Being under high rather than low cognitive load caused females compared with males to recall experiencing more intense emotional reactions to saddening stimuli (Experiments 1 and 2), and relatively less intense reactions to angering stimuli (Experiment 2). Being directly primed with stereotypes about sex differences and being under high cognitive load both caused females to recall more intense reactions to saddening stimuli compared with females who were neither primed with stereotypes nor under cognitive load (Experiment 3). These results imply that the relative accessibility of stereotypes influences memories of emotion in a manner similar to stereotypes' influence on social perception. Implications of these findings for theories of emotion memory and for self-perpetuating stereotypes about emotional sex differences are discussed.

People exhibit an immediacy bias when making judgments and decisions about humanitarian aid, perceiving as more deserving and donating disproportionately to humanitarian crises that happen to arouse immediate emotion. The immediacy bias produced different serial position effects, contingent on decision timing (Experiment 1). When making allocation decisions directly after viewing to four emotionally evocative films about four different humanitarian crises, participants donated disproportionately more to the final, immediate crisis, in contrast, when making donation decisions sequentially, after viewing each of the four crises, participants donated disproportionately to the immediate crisis. The immediacy bias was associated with ‘‘scope neglect,’’ causing people to take action against relatively less deadly crises (Experiments 2 and 3). The immediacy bias emerged even when participants were warned about emotional manipulation (Experiment 3). The immediacy bias diminished over time, as immediate emotions presumably subsided (Experiment 2). Implications for charitable giving, serial position effects, and the influence of emotion on choice are discussed.

People exhibit an ‘‘illusion of courage’’ when predicting their own behavior in embarrassing situations. In three experiments, participants overestimated their own willingness to engage in embarrassing public performances in exchange for money when those performances were psychologically distant: Hypothetical or in the relatively distant future. This illusion of courage occurs partly because of cold/hot empathy gaps. That is, people in a relatively ‘‘cold’’ unemotional state underestimate the influence on their own preferences and behaviors of being in a relative ‘‘hot’’ emotional state such as social anxiety evoked by an embarrassing situation. Consistent with this cold/hot empathy gap explanation, putting people ‘‘in touch’’ with negative emotional states by arousing fear (Experiments 1 and 2) and anger (Experiment 2) decreased people’s willingness to engage in psychologically distant embarrassing public performances. Conversely, putting people ‘‘out of touch’’ with social anxiety through aerobic exercise, which reduces state anxiety and increases confidence, increased people’s willingness to engage in psychologically distance embarrassing public performances (Experiment 3). Implications for self-predictions, self-evaluation, and affective forecasting are discussed. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The results of six experiments indicate that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. People who described events emotionally rather than neutrally perceived those events as less psychologically distant, including embarrassing autobiographical events (Experiment 1), past and future dentist visits (Experiment 2), positive and negative events (Experiment 3), and a national tragedy (Experiment 6). People also perceived an event (dancing in front of an audience) as less psychologically distant when they were in a more emotionally arousing social role (of performer) than in a less emotionally arousing social role (of observer, Experiment 4). Two findings bolster the causal role of emotional intensity in reducing perceived psychological distance. First, reported emotional intensity was negatively correlated with perceived psychological distance, and statistically mediated the effect of being in an emotionally arousing social role on perceived psychological distance (Experiment 4). Second, providing people with an alternative interpretation of their emotions (emotionally ambiguous whale “songs”) significantly reduced, even reversed, the negative correlation between self-reported emotional intensity and perceived psychological distance (Experiment 5). These findings about emotional intensity are consistent with the broader idea that perceived psychological distance is grounded in and influenced by the phenomenology of objective distance. Implications for theories of psychological distance, emotionality, and choice are discussed.

In two experiments, we observed that when given the choice of gambling or not gambling, people who chose not to gamble underestimated the intensity of their affective reactions to the forgone gamble’s outcome. Those who would have been winners felt more displeasure than anticipated, and those who would have been losers felt more pleasure than anticipated. We suggest that this underestimation stems partly from people’s belief that affective experience is relatively uninfluenced by events they chose not to experience. Consistent with this suggestion, participants’ affective forecasts were not influenced by whether the participants or a computer made the choice not to gamble—as though participants did not feel personally responsible for the forgone outcome, whether chosen by themselves or by a computer. In contrast to their affective forecasts, however, participants’ affective reactions to forgone outcomes were less intense when the computer chose not to gamble than when the participants themselves made the choice not to gamble. Participants therefore proved to be more accurate in predicting their affective reactions to the results of the computer’s decision not to gamble than in predicting their affective reactions to the results of their own decision not to gamble. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Five studies examined the stigmatization of materialism. Participants expressed negative stereotypes of materialistic people, considering them to be more selfish and self-centered than experiential people (Study 1). Participants also viewed materialistic pursuits as more extrinsically motivated than experiential pursuits (Study 2). These stereotypes led respondents from varied demographic backgrounds to form less favorable impressions of individuals who were associated with prototypically materialistic versus experiential purchases, a result that was statistically mediated by impressions that materialistic purchases were more extrinsically motivated (Study 3). These differential impressions are primarily attributable to the denigration of materialistic people rather than the admiration of experiential people (Study 4). The stigmatization of materialism led participants to like less and enjoy interacting less with their conversation partners when discussing materialistic rather than experiential purchases (Study 5). The authors discuss these findings’ implications for self-perception, accurate social perception, and well-being.

People tend to perceive immediate emotions as more intense than previous emotions. This immediacy bias in emotion perception occurred for exposure to emotional but not neutral stimuli (Study 1), when emotional stimuli were separated by both shorter (2 s; Studies 1 and 2) and longer (20 min; Studies 3, 4, and 5) delays, and for emotional reactions to pictures (Studies 1 and 2), films (Studies 3 and 4), and descriptions of terrorist threats (Study 5). The immediacy bias may be partly caused by immediate emotion's salience, and by the greater availability of information about immediate compared with previous emotion. Consistent with emotional salience, when people experienced new emotions, they perceived previous emotions as less intense than they did initially (Studies 3 and 5)-a change in perception that did not occur when people did not experience a new immediate emotion (Study 2). Consistent with emotional availability, reminding people that information about emotions naturally decays from memory reduced the immediacy bias by making previous emotions seem more intense (Study 4). Discussed are implications for psychological theory and other judgments and behaviors.

An important component of political polarization in the United States is the degree to which ordinary people perceive political polarization. We used over 30 years of national survey data from the American National Election Study to examine how the public perceives political polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties and between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. People in the United States consistently overestimate polarization between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. People who perceive the greatest political polarization are most likely to report having been politically active, including voting, trying to sway others’ political beliefs, and making campaign contributions. We present a 3-factor framework to understand ordinary people’s perceptions of political polarization. We suggest that people perceive greater political polarization when they (a) estimate the attitudes of those categorized as being in the “opposing group”; (b) identify strongly as either Democrat or Republican; and (c) hold relatively extreme partisan attitudes—particularly when those partisan attitudes align with their own partisan political identity. These patterns of polarization perception occur among both Democrats and Republicans.