Lay theories of financial well-being predict political and policy message preferences.

People differ in their lay theories about how and why the financial well-being of individuals changes over time or varies between individuals. We introduce a measure of Causal Attributions of Financial Uncertainty-the CAFU scale-and find that such attributions can be described reliably along three distinct dimensions, respectively capturing the extent to which changes in financial well-being are perceived to be: (a) knowable and within individuals' control due to individual factors such as effort ("Rewarding"); (b) knowable and outside of individuals' control due to factors such as favoritism and discrimination ("Rigged"); and (c) inherently unpredictable and determined by chance events ("Random"). In a sample representative of the U.S. population on various demographic characteristics (N = 1,102), we find that differences in these beliefs are associated with political ideology, revealing a predicted pattern: conservatives scored higher on the Rewarding subscale and liberals scored higher on the Rigged and Random subscales, even when controlling for key demographics. Moreover, we find that these three dimensions predict responses to different policy messages, even when controlling for political ideology. In three preregistered experiments (combined N = 2,560), we observe increased support for various social welfare policies when we highlighted aspects of these policies that are compatible with people's beliefs about financial well-being. Likewise, we observe increased support for political candidates when they expressed their positions in a way that is compatible with people's beliefs. Thus, this work can help better understand drivers of political attitudes and guide in crafting more persuasive policy messages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Two dimensions of subjective uncertainty: Clues from natural language.

We argue that people intuitively distinguish epistemic (knowable) uncertainty from aleatory (random) uncertainty and show that the relative salience of these dimensions is reflected in natural language use. We hypothesize that confidence statements (e.g., "I am fairly confident," "I am 90% sure," "I am reasonably certain") communicate a subjective assessment of primarily epistemic uncertainty, whereas likelihood statements (e.g., "I believe it is fairly likely," "I'd say there is a 90% chance," "I think there is a high probability") communicate a subjective assessment of primarily aleatory uncertainty. First, we show that speakers tend to use confidence statements to express epistemic uncertainty and they tend to use likelihood statements to express aleatory uncertainty; we observe this in a 2-year sample of New York Times articles (Study 1), and in participants' explicit choices of which statements more naturally express different uncertain events (Studies 2A and 2B). Second, we show that when speakers apply confidence versus likelihood statements to the same events, listeners infer different reasoning (Study 3): confidence statements suggest epistemic rationale (singular reasoning, feeling of knowing, internal control), whereas likelihood statements suggest aleatory rationale (distributional reasoning, relative frequency information, external control). Third, we show that confidence versus likelihood statements can differentially prompt epistemic versus aleatory thoughts, respectively, as observed when participants complete sentences that begin with confidence versus likelihood statements (Study 4) and when they quantify these statements based on feeling-of-knowing (epistemic) and frequency (aleatory) information (Study 5).

The effects of curiosity-evoking events on activity enjoyment.

Whereas prior literature has studied the positive effects of curiosity-evoking events that are integral to focal activities, we explore whether and how a curiosity-evoking event that is incidental to a focal activity induces negative outcomes for enjoyment. Four experiments and 1 field study demonstrate that curiosity about an event that is incidental to an activity in which individuals are engaged, significantly affects enjoyment of a concurrent activity. The reason why is that curiosity diverts attention away from the concurrent activity and focuses attention on the curiosity-evoking event. Thus, curiosity regarding an incidental event decreases enjoyment of a positive focal activity but increases enjoyment of a negative focal activity.