Social status and unethical behavior: Two replications of the field studies in Piff et al. (2012).

Prominent social psychologists and major media outlets have put forward the notion that people of high socioeconomic status (SES) are more selfish and behave more unethically than people of low SES. In contrast, other research in economics and sociology has hypothesized and found a positive relationship between SES and prosocial and ethical behavior. We review the empirical evidence for these contradictory findings and conduct two direct, well-powered, and preregistered replications of the field studies by Piff and colleagues (2012) to test the relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior. Unlike the original findings, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior in the two field replication studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

99% impossible: A valid, or falsifiable, internal meta-analysis.

Several researchers have relied on, or advocated for, internal meta-analysis, which involves statistically aggregating multiple studies in a paper to assess their overall evidential value. Advocates of internal meta-analysis argue that it provides an efficient approach to increasing statistical power and solving the file-drawer problem. Here we show that the validity of internal meta-analysis rests on the assumption that no studies or analyses were selectively reported. That is, the technique is only valid if (a) all conducted studies were included (i.e., an empty file drawer), and (b) for each included study, exactly one analysis was attempted (i.e., there was no p-hacking). We show that even very small doses of selective reporting invalidate internal meta-analysis. For example, the kind of minimal p-hacking that increases the false-positive rate of 1 study to just 8% increases the false-positive rate of a 10-study internal meta-analysis to 83%. If selective reporting is approximately zero, but not exactly zero, then internal meta-analysis is invalid. To be valid, (a) an internal meta-analysis would need to contain exclusively studies that were properly preregistered, (b) those preregistrations would have to be followed in all essential aspects, and (c) the decision of whether to include a given study in an internal meta-analysis would have to be made before any of those studies are run. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Differential discounting and present impact of past information.

How does information about a person's past, accessed now, affect individuals' impressions of that person? In 2 survey experiments and 2 experiments with actual incentives, we compare whether, when evaluating a person, information about that person's past greedy or immoral behaviors is discounted similarly to information about her past generous or moral behaviors. We find that, no matter how far in the past a person behaved greedily or immorally, information about her negative behaviors is hardly discounted at all. In contrast, information about her past positive behaviors is discounted heavily: recent behaviors are much more influential than behaviors that occurred a long time ago. The lesser discounting of information about immoral and greedy behaviors is not caused by these behaviors being more influential, memorable, extreme, or attention-grabbing; rather, they are perceived as more diagnostic of a person's character than past moral or generous behaviors. The phenomenon of differential discounting of past information has particular relevance in the digital age, where information about people's past is easily retrieved. Our findings have significant implications for theories of impression formation and social information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record

More Similar but Less Satisfying: Comparing Preferences for and the Efficacy of Within- and Cross-Category Substitutes for Food.

When people cannot get what they want, they often satisfy their desire by consuming a substitute. Substitutes can originate from within the taxonomic category of the desired stimulus (i.e., within-category substitutes) or from a different taxonomic category that serves the same basic goal (i.e., cross-category substitutes). Both a store-brand chocolate (within-category substitute) and a granola bar (cross-category substitute), for example, can serve as substitutes for gourmet chocolate. Here, we found that people believe that within-category substitutes, which are more similar to desired stimuli, will more effectively satisfy their cravings than will cross-category substitutes (Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b). However, because within-category substitutes are more similar than cross-category substitutes to desired stimuli, they are more likely to evoke an unanticipated negative contrast effect. As a result, unless substitutes are equivalent in quality to the desired stimulus, cross-category substitutes more effectively satisfy cravings for the desired stimulus (Experiments 3 and 4).

You call it "self-exuberance"; I call it "bragging": miscalibrated predictions of emotional responses to self-promotion.

People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a trade-off between conveying one's positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this trade-off wrong because they erroneously project their own feelings onto their interaction partners. As a consequence, people overestimate the extent to which recipients of their self-promotion will feel proud of and happy for them, and underestimate the extent to which recipients will feel annoyed (Experiments 1 and 2). Because people tend to promote themselves excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of self-promotion to view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts (Experiment 3).

More intense experiences, less intense forecasts: why people overweight probability specifications in affective forecasts.

We propose that affective forecasters overestimate the extent to which experienced hedonic responses to an outcome are influenced by the probability of its occurrence. The experience of an outcome (e.g., winning a gamble) is typically more affectively intense than the simulation of that outcome (e.g., imagining winning a gamble) upon which the affective forecast for it is based. We suggest that, as a result, experiencers allocate a larger share of their attention toward the outcome (e.g., winning the gamble) and less to its probability specifications than do affective forecasters. Consequently, hedonic responses to an outcome are less sensitive to its probability specifications than are affective forecasts for that outcome. The results of 6 experiments provide support for our theory. Affective forecasters overestimated how sensitive experiencers would be to the probability of positive and negative outcomes (Experiments 1 and 2). Consistent with our attentional account, differences in sensitivity to probability specifications disappeared when the attention of forecasters was diverted from probability specifications (Experiment 3) or when the attention of experiencers was drawn toward probability specifications (Experiment 4). Finally, differences in sensitivity to probability specifications between forecasters and experiencers were diminished when the forecasted outcome was more affectively intense (Experiments 5 and 6).

Reputation as a sufficient condition for data quality on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Data quality is one of the major concerns of using crowdsourcing websites such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to recruit participants for online behavioral studies. We compared two methods for ensuring data quality on MTurk: attention check questions (ACQs) and restricting participation to MTurk workers with high reputation (above 95% approval ratings). In Experiment 1, we found that high-reputation workers rarely failed ACQs and provided higher-quality data than did low-reputation workers; ACQs improved data quality only for low-reputation workers, and only in some cases. Experiment 2 corroborated these findings and also showed that more productive high-reputation workers produce the highest-quality data. We concluded that sampling high-reputation workers can ensure high-quality data without having to resort to using ACQs, which may lead to selection bias if participants who fail ACQs are excluded post-hoc.

Thought for food: imagined consumption reduces actual consumption.

The consumption of a food typically leads to a decrease in its subsequent intake through habituation--a decrease in one's responsiveness to the food and motivation to obtain it. We demonstrated that habituation to a food item can occur even when its consumption is merely imagined. Five experiments showed that people who repeatedly imagined eating a food (such as cheese) many times subsequently consumed less of the imagined food than did people who repeatedly imagined eating that food fewer times, imagined eating a different food (such as candy), or did not imagine eating a food. They did so because they desired to eat it less, not because they considered it less palatable. These results suggest that mental representation alone can engender habituation to a stimulus.

How prevalent is wishful thinking? Misattribution of arousal causes optimism and pessimism in subjective probabilities.

People appear to be unrealistically optimistic about their future prospects, as reflected by theory and research in the fields of psychology, organizational behavior, behavioral economics, and behavioral finance. Many real-world examples (e.g., consumer behavior during economic recessions), however, suggest that people are not always overly optimistic. I suggest that people can be both overly optimistic and pessimistic in their beliefs about future events, depending on whether they focus on success or on failure. More specifically, people judge the likelihood of desirable and undesirable events to be higher than similar neutral events because they misattribute the arousal those events evoke to their greater perceived likelihood. I demonstrated this stake-likelihood effect in 4 studies. In Study 1, arousal was shown to increase likelihood judgments. Study 2 demonstrated that such elevated likelihood judgments are due to misattribution of the arousal from having a stake in the outcome. Study 3 demonstrated that such misattribution of arousal occurs for desirable and undesirable events. Study 4 showed the effects of optimism and pessimism on likelihood judgments in a field setting with soccer fans. Together, the findings suggest that wishful thinking might be less prevalent than previously believed. Pessimism might be as likely as optimism in subjective probabilities.