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Six preregistered studies show that the degree of similarity of two objects biases people’s spatial memory of these objects. When objects are high in similarity, people remember having seen them closer together in space than when they are low in similarity. All six studies provide correlational evidence, showing that the more similar participants rated two stimuli, the smaller they remembered the distance between them. This was true for both conceptual and perceptual similarity (Study 3). Furthermore, Studies 2, 4A, and 4B provide evidence of causality by manipulating similarity experimentally. Replicating the correlational findings, highly similar stimuli were remembered as closer together than stimuli low in similarity. This pattern was found across different stimulus categories and similarity dimensions. Overall, these findings show that the similarity of stimuli influences perceivers’ reconstruction of their spatial locations.

Conviction Narrative Theory holds that reasoners adopt “a narrative that feels ‘right’ to explain the available data” and use “that narrative to imagine plausible futures” (target article, Abstract). Drawing on feelings-as-information theory, this commentary reviews the role of metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty and highlights that fluently processed narratives are more likely to “feel right.”

Recent virtual court proceedings have seen a range of technological challenges, producing not only trial interruptions but also cognitive interruptions in processing evidence. Very little empirical research has focused on how the subjective experience of processing evidence affects evaluations of trial participants and trial decisions. Metacognitive research shows that the subjective ease or difficulty of processing information can affect evaluations of people, belief in information, and how a given piece of information is weighted in decision making.We hypothesized that when people experienced technological challenges (e.g., poor audio quality) while listening to eyewitness accounts, the difficulty in processing evidence would lead them to evaluate a witness more negatively, influence their memory for key facts, and lead them to weigh that evidence less in final trial judgments.Across three experiments (total N = 593), participants listened to audio clips of witnesses describing an event, one presented in high-quality audio and one presented in low-quality audio.When people heard witnesses present evidence in low-quality audio, they rated the witnesses as less credible, reliable, and trustworthy (Experiment 1, d = 0.32; Experiment 3, d = 0.55); had poorer memory for key facts presented by the witness (Experiment 2, d = 0.44); and weighted witness evidence less in final guilt judgments (Experiment 3, ηThese results show that audio quality influences perceptions of witnesses and their evidence. Because these variables can contribute to trial outcomes, audio quality warrants consideration in trial proceedings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words that predominantly occur alongside positive (or negative) words in natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity when evaluated in isolation, such semantically prosodic words activate the evaluative associations of their usual company, which can color judgment in unrelated domains. For example, people are more likely to infer that “endocrination” (a fictional medical outcome) is negative when it is “caused” (a word with negative semantic prosody) rather than “produced” (a synonymous word without semantic prosody). We review what is known about the influence of semantically prosodic words and highlight their importance for judgment and decision making.

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs male) names collocate with art- (vs science-) related concepts, and African American (vs White American) names collocate with negative (vs positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept “cause” as neutral, but “cause” is frequently followed by negative concepts (e.g., death, pain, trouble). We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns (Study 1) or pictures (Study 2) after seeing verb primes that were (a) strongly valenced (e.g., hate, comfort), (b) neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., ease, gain), or (c) neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., reply, describe). Throughout, neutral primes with positive (negative) collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive (negative) targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering implicit bias. Societal implications of the causal embedding hypothesis are discussed.

Information is judged as more true when it has been seen or heard repeatedly than when it is new. This illusory truth effect has important consequences in the real world, where we are repeatedly exposed to information of unknown veracity. While false information in natural contexts rarely comes with a warning label, false information in truth effect experiments often does. Commonly used experimental procedures alert participants to potential falsehoods at exposure through instructional warnings. Three experiments show that the size of the truth effect is over twice as large when such warnings are avoided. The influence of pre-exposure warnings on the size of the truth effect persists even after a delay of three to six days. These findings demonstrate that common experimental procedures invite a systematic underestimation of illusory truth effects. They also highlight that simple warnings can curb the impact of repetition on judgments of truth.

Bodily sensations impact metaphorically related judgments. Are such effects obligatory or do they follow the logic of knowledge accessibility? If the latter, the impact of sensory information should be moderated by the accessibility of the related metaphor at the time of sensory experience. We manipulated whether “importance” was on participants’ minds when they held a physically heavy versus light book. Participants held the book while making an importance judgment versus returned it before making the judgment (Study 1) or learned prior to holding the book that the study was about “importance evaluations” versus “graphics evaluations” (Study 2). In both studies, the same book was judged more important when its heft was increased but only when importance was on participants’ minds at the time of sensory experience. We conclude that sensory experiences only impact metaphorically related judgments when the applicable metaphor is highly accessible at the time of experience.

The Prototypical Majority Effect (PME) refers to the observation that people endorse majority opinions faster and with greater confidence than minority opinions. Although the PME has been assumed to stem from social influence, recent studies showed that it can arise from internal processes underlying decision and confidence alone. We used a conformity paradigm adapted from Asch (1951) to examine the relative contributions of internal and external processes to the PME. Four participants responded in turn to items that had correct or wrong predetermined majority responses. A robust PME was observed before participants saw others’ responses. Seeing these responses, however, increased endorsement, confidence, and speed. Notably, social influence had a considerably weaker impact when it ran counter to the consensus observed in its absence. Thus, internal processes underlying decision and confidence constrain the impact of social conformity. The failure to consider these processes leads to overestimating the magnitude of social influence.

It is almost a truism that people’s judgments (and the resulting behaviors) depend on what’s on their mind. Theories of social psychology have harnessed this insight to account for mental construct...

Bellicose metaphors for cancer are ubiquitous. But are they good metaphors for health communicators to use? Because metaphors can guide reasoning about abstract concepts, framing cancer with metaphors of battle, war, and enemies leads people to apply attributes of these concepts to cancer. The current research investigates how this affects inferences about cancer treatment, prevention, and monitoring. Battles and war are usually seen as being difficult. Indeed, reading about a person's "battle" or "fight" against cancer makes cancer treatment seem more difficult (studies 1-4). One way to approach a battle is to surrender and give up control. Consistent with this implication, battle metaphors increase fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention (e.g. believing that there is little one can do to prevent getting cancer; study 3). Finally, even though battles invoke vigilance and action, Study 4 failed to find that such metaphors motivate people to immediately see their doctor when imagining a cancer scare. These findings suggest that bellicose metaphors for cancer can influence the health beliefs of nonpatients in ways that may make them less willing to enact healthy behaviors.

Researchers can characterize people’s well-being by asking them to provide global evaluations of large parts of their life at one time or by obtaining repeated assessments during their daily lives. Global evaluations are reconstructions that are influenced by peak, recent, and frequently occurring states, whereas daily reports reflect naturally occurring variations in daily life. The present research compared the averages of individual global evaluations and corresponding aggregated daily states from an ordinary two-week period and used a range of well-being measures (life satisfaction, meaning in life, and affect) and related constructs (searching for meaning in life and nostalgia). Across all measures, global reports were significantly higher than aggregated daily states. That is, life is considered more satisfying, more meaningful, and is characterized to a greater extent by more intense positive and negative emotions when reflecting on life in general than when reflecting on daily life in real time.

The current article tests the metacognitive proposition that the relative ease or difficulty with which narrative messages are processed can affect subsequent judgment. Challenging the assertion th...

Our commentators explore the operation of grounded procedures across all levels of analysis in the behavioral sciences, from mental to social, developmental, and evolutionary/functional. Building on them, we offer two integrative principles for systematic effects of grounded procedures to occur. We discuss theoretical topics at each level of analysis, address methodological recommendations, and highlight further extensions of grounded procedures.

[Retraction notice: A retraction for this article was reported in Vol 150(6) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (see record 2021-94347-001). The following article is being retracted: Xu, J., Wan, F., & Schwarz, N. (2020, October 29). "That's bitter!": Culture-specific effects of gustatory experience on judgments of fairness and advancement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10 .1037/xge0000985 A user of the open science data sets accompanying the article noticed confounds between culture condition or treatment condition and sex of participants in studies 3, 4, and 5. What caused these confounds could not be fully reconstructed. The first and second authors, who handled data collection, assume that the confounds resulted from a confluence of two decisions. First, students were recruited through campus advertisements and encouraged to bring friends, which resulted in the arrival of mostly same-sex groups. Second, in deviation from standard protocol, the administration of the taste tests was simplified in these studies by administering the same treatment to all participants who arrived together. Hence, the authors asked for a retraction.....] In English, unfair treatment and social injustice are often described as "bitter" experiences, whereas "eating bitterness" refers to endurance in the face of hardship in Chinese. This suggests that bitter taste may ground experiences of adversity in both cultures, but in culture-specific forms. We tested this possibility by assessing Canadian and Chinese participants' responses to fairness and achievement scenarios after incidental exposure to bitter or neutral tastes. Tasting something bitter increased self-reported motivation and intention to invest effort for Chinese participants, but not Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1, 4, 5). Tasting something bitter decreased perceived fairness for Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1-3) but not Chinese participants living in China (Study 2). The fairness judgments of Chinese participants living in Canada shed light on adaptation to the host culture: Bitter taste decreased these participants' fairness judgments after living in Canada for 4 years or more (Study 4), provided they were tested in English (Studies 3-4), but exerted no influence when they were tested in Chinese (Study 4). The observed cultural differences are compatible with a relatively higher emphasis on self-improvement in China versus self-enhancement in Canada. Supporting this conjecture, the fairness judgments of Chinese students in Canada followed the Anglo-Canadian pattern when primed with a self-enhancement motive and the effort judgments of Anglo-Canadian students followed the Chinese pattern when primed with a self-improvement motive (Study 5). This suggest that a universal aversive experience (bitter taste) grounds thought about adversity in ways compatible with cultural orientations and reflected in culture-specific metaphors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Bodily sensations impact metaphorically related judgments. Are such effects obligatory or do they follow the logic of knowledge accessibility? If the latter, the impact of sensory information should be moderated by the accessibility of the related metaphor at the time of sensory experience. We manipulated whether “importance” was on participants’ minds when they held a physically heavy vs. light book. Participants held the book while making an importance judgment vs. returned it before making the judgment (Study 1) or learned prior to holding the book that the study was about “importance evaluations” vs. “graphics evaluations” (Study 2). In both studies, the same book was judged more important when its heft was increased, but only when importance was on participants’ minds at the time of sensory experience. We conclude that sensory experiences only impact metaphorically-related judgments when the applicable metaphor is highly accessible at the time of experience.

This chapter provides a selective review of some of the available evidence, focusing on the impact of affective states on analytic reasoning. It offers a theoretical framework for the conceptualization of affective influences on information processing. To begin with the most fundamental issue, the chapter considers why one might expect that individuals' affective state influences their mode of information processing, before he turn to some selective evidence. While the preceding discussion pertained to subjects' reasoning about the situation that elicited the affective state to begin with, the chapter provides information on the more intriguing possibility that the impact of affective states may generalize to other tasks that individuals work on while in that state. Evidence for the assumption that different affective states are associated with different styles of organizing information is also provided by Bless et al.

Experimental work has revealed causal links between physical cleansing and various psychological variables. Empirically, how robust are they? Theoretically, how do they operate? Major prevailing accounts focus on morality or disgust, capturing a subset of cleansing effects, but cannot easily handle cleansing effects in non-moral, non-disgusting contexts. Building on grounded views on cognitive processes and known properties of mental procedures, we proposegrounded proceduresof separation as a proximate mechanism underlying cleansing effects. This account differs from prevailing accounts in terms of explanatory kind, interpretive parsimony, and predictive scope. Its unique and falsifiable predictions have received empirical support: Cleansing attenuates or eliminates otherwise observed influences of prior events (1) across domains and (2) across valences. (3) Cleansing manipulations produce stronger effects the more strongly they engage sensorimotor capacities. (4) Reversing the causal arrow, motivation for cleansing is triggered more readily by negative than positive entities. (5) Conceptually similar effects extend to other physical actions of separation. On the flipside, grounded procedures ofconnectionare also observed. Together, separation and connection organize prior findings relevant to multiple perspectives (e.g., conceptual metaphor, sympathetic magic) and open up new questions. Their predictions are more generalizable than the specific mappings in conceptual metaphors, but more fine-grained than the broad assumptions of grounded cognition. This intermediate level of analysis sheds light on the interplay between mental and physical processes.

Despite their prevalence in the marketplace, little empirical attention has been paid to how employee uniforms affect consumer reactions to service experiences. We propose that employee uniforms facilitate the shared categorization of employees and their organization in the mind of the customer, which affects many of the inferences that customers draw following service encounters. Study 1 shows that uniforms lead to greater attribution of responsibility to the company for employee behavior, especially following poor service. Studies 2 and 3 show that uniforms also lead to more assimilation of judgments across employees, increasing the impact of one employee's behavior on judgments of other employees of the same organization. Study 3 shows that employee uniforms lead to more extreme judgments of the company following service encounters. It also shows that bad (good) service from a uniformed employee makes competing companies look better (worse), indicating that uniforms can elicit contrast effects across companies. In sum, the mere presence of a uniform on an unsatisfactory service or retail employee can damage judgments of the organization and its employees and improve judgments of rival organizations compared to identical service from a nonuniformed employee. Managers seem unaware of these negative consequences. These same principles are likely to apply to a wide variety of uniformed services, including police, military, firefighters, and health‐care providers.

Conservatives report greater life satisfaction than liberals, but this relationship is relatively weak. To date, the evidence is limited to a narrow set of well-being measures that ask participants for a single assessment of their life in general. We address this shortcoming by examining the relationship between political orientation and well-being using measures of life satisfaction, affect, and meaning and purpose in life. Participants completed well-being measures after reflecting on their whole life (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2), at the end of their day (Study 3), and in the present moment (Study 4). Across five studies, conservatives reported greater meaning and purpose in life than liberals at each reporting period. This finding remained significant after adjusting for religiosity and was usually stronger than the relationships involving other well-being measures. Finally, meaning in life was more closely related to social conservatism than economic conservatism.

Increasingly, scientific communications are recorded and made available online. While researchers carefully draft the words they use, the quality of the recording is at the mercy of technical staff. Does it make a difference? We presented identical conference talks (Experiment 1) and radio interviews from NPR’s Science Friday (Experiment 2) in high or low audio quality and asked people to evaluate the researcher and the research they presented. Despite identical content, people evaluated the research and researcher less favorably when the audio quality was low, suggesting that audio quality can influence impressions of science.

Would we think more negatively of a person who caused rather than produced an outcome or who is described as utterly rather than totally unconventional? While these word choices may appear to be trivial, cause and utterly occur more frequently in a negative context in natural language use than produced or totally, even though these words do not have an explicit valenced meaning. Words that are primarily used in a valenced context are said to have semantic prosody. Five studies show that semantically-prosodic descriptors affect the impressions formed of others. These effects occur even in situations where perceivers are likely to be skeptical of messages, and they impact behavioral intentions toward targets. An utterly changed person was perceived as less warm and competent than a totally changed person (Study 1), and people held more negative impressions of an utterly rather than totally unconventional boss (Study 2). People had stronger intentions to vote for a political candidate who produced budget changes over one who caused them (Study 3) and preferred a bank that lends money (a word with positive semantic prosody) over a bank that loans money (Study 4). Finally, participants had more (less) romantic interest in potential dating partners with Tinder profiles that utilized words with positive (negative) semantic prosody (Study 5). We conclude that semantically prosodic descriptors that lack a clear positive or negative meaning still lead people to infer the valence of what is to come, which colors the impressions they form of others.

In everyday language, abstract concepts are described in terms of concrete physical experiences (e.g., good things are “up”; the past is “behind” us). Stimuli congruent with such conceptual metaphors are processed faster than stimuli that are not. Since ease of processing enhances aesthetic pleasure, stimuli should be perceived as more pleasing when their presentation matches (rather than mismatches) the metaphorical mapping. In six experiments, speakers of English (Experiment 1-3a) and Farsi (Experiment 3b and 4) viewed valence- and time-related photos in arrangements congruent and incongruent with their metaphorical mapping. Consistent with the valence-verticality metaphor in both languages, English and Farsi speakers preferred visual arrangements that placed the happy photo above the sad photo. In contrast, participants' preferences for time-related photos were moderated by the direction of writing. English speakers, who write from left to right, preferred arrangements that placed past-themed photos to the left of modern-themed photos; this was not observed for Farsi speakers, who write from right to left as well as left to right. In sum, identical stimuli enjoy an aesthetic advantage when their spatial arrangement matches the spatial ordering implied by applicable conceptual metaphors.

Cognitions involved in a goal-directed activity may influence people’s behaviors in unrelated domains. We review evidence for such spillover effects and discuss the underlying processes in terms of behavioral mind-sets.

Insufficient attention to political ideology as an organizing axis reduces predictive power. Jost (2017 – this issue) makes a significant contribution by outlining and documenting a set of relationships among personality factors, attitudes, values, and conservatism. The value of this approach is highlighting the possibility that ideology sticks when it fits features of the individual and hence has an enduring quality. This approach needs to be balanced by consideration of the power of the immediate situation to define what an identity means and the potential universality of many features associated with conservatism. We discuss both issues using identity-based motivation theory as our organizing framework.

Mixed feelings come in many forms. We focus on mixed feelings resulting from conflicting evaluations of a single attitude object, that is, attitudinal ambivalence. Research on attitudinal ambivalence has led to specific measures that assess the presence, intensity, and resolution of ambivalence, shedding new light on underlying dynamics and moderators. This work has also spawned an interest in the metacognitive experiences of conflict that arise from ambivalence and their downstream consequences for judgment and choice. Because research into mixed emotions may benefit from these conceptual and methodological developments, the current article provides an introductory overview of attitudinal ambivalence and its measurement.