Evaluations are inherently comparative, but are compared to what?

Understanding how objective quantities are translated into subjective evaluations has long been of interest to social scientists, medical professionals, and policymakers with an interest in how people process and act on quantitative information. The theory of decision by sampling proposes a comparative procedure: Values seem larger or smaller based on how they rank in a comparison set, the decision sample. But what values are included in this decision sample? We identify and test four mechanistic accounts, each suggesting that how previously encountered attribute values are processed determines whether they linger in the sample to guide the subjective interpretation, and thus the influence, of newly encountered values. Testing our ideas through studies of loss aversion, delay discounting, and vaccine hesitancy, we find strongest support for one account: Quantities need to be subjectively evaluated-rather than merely encountered-for them to enter the decision sample, alter the subjective interpretation of other values, and then guide decision making. Discussion focuses on how the present findings inform understanding of the nature of the decision sample and identify new research directions for the longstanding question of how comparison standards influence decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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).

Prosocial spending encourages happiness: A replication of the only experiment reported in Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008).

Spending money on one's self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, often heightens one's sense of happiness. It is therefore both surprising and important that people can be even happier after spending money on someone else. We conducted a close replication of a key experiment from Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) to verify and expand upon their findings. Participants were given money and randomly assigned to either spend it on themselves or on someone else. Although the original study (N = 46) found that the latter group was happier, when we used the same analysis in our replication (N = 133), we did not observe a significant difference. However, we report an additional analysis, focused on a more direct measure of happiness, that does show a significant effect in the direction of the original. Follow-up analyses shed new insights into people's predictions about their own and others' happiness and their actual happiness when spending money for themselves or others.

Responsibility amplifies empathic forecasts.

Inspired by theoretical and empirical work on emotion, psychological distance, moral psychology, and people's tendency to overgeneralize ecologically valid relationships, 3 studies explore whether, why, and for whom responsibility amplifies empathic forecasts (RAEF)-the perception that an intentional agent's social actions will produce stronger affective responses in others than if those same outcomes were to occur randomly or unintentionally. In Study 1, participants thought that pleasant or aversive videos would elicit stronger reactions when participants themselves (instead of the random determination of a computer) would select the video another would watch. This was explained by responsible agents' own stronger reactions to the stimuli. Study 2 identified what about agents' responsibility amplifies empathic forecasts: the combination of clearly causing and intending the other's outcome. Study 3 demonstrated that RAEF need not extend to all responsible agents equally. Participants considered how to divide (vs. how another participant would divide or how a computer would randomly split) $10 with a recipient. In this context, we found the weight of causal responsibility looms larger in the self's mind when the self is responsible for the recipient's fate than when another responsible agent is. Furthermore, the self thought that the recipient's emotional reaction would be more strongly influenced by the size of the self's own (compared to another's or a computer's) allocation decision. The Discussion focuses on how RAEF relates to other models connecting agency and experience, provides initial evidence that RAEF need not be egocentric, and identifies open questions that remain for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Overestimating the valuations and preferences of others.

People often make judgments about their own and others' valuations and preferences. Across 12 studies (N = 17,594), we find a robust bias in these judgments such that people overestimate the valuations and preferences of others. This overestimation arises because, when making predictions about others, people rely on their intuitive core representation of the experience (e.g., is the experience generally positive?) in lieu of a more complex representation that might also include countervailing aspects (e.g., is any of the experience negative?). We first demonstrate that the overestimation bias is pervasive for a wide range of positive (Studies 1-5) and negative experiences (Study 6). Furthermore, the bias is not merely an artifact of how preferences are measured (Study 7). Consistent with judgments based on core representations, the bias significantly reduces when the core representation is uniformly positive (Studies 8A-8B). Such judgments lead to a paradox in how people see others trade off between valuation and utility (Studies 9A-9B). Specifically, relative to themselves, people believe that an identically paying other will get more enjoyment from the same experience, but paradoxically, that an identically enjoying other will pay more for the same experience. Finally, consistent with a core representation explanation, explicitly prompting people to consider the entire distribution of others' preferences significantly reduced or eliminated the bias (Study 10). These findings suggest that social judgments of others' preferences are not only largely biased, but they also ignore how others make trade-offs between evaluative metrics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The vicarious construal effect: Seeing and experiencing the world through different eyes.

That 2 individuals can look at the same stimulus and experience it differently speaks to the power of construal. People's construals are shaped by their idiosyncratic attitudes, belief systems, and personal histories. Eleven studies provide support for and explain the origin of a vicarious construal effect: Considering perspectives one once had but seemingly lost, one ordinarily would have only with more experience, or one would not have had spontaneously, all exerted an assimilative pull on one's ongoing experiences. This means habituation can be slowed or stalled by considering another's fresh perspective (Studies 1-6), desensitization can be preemptively achieved by considering another's stale perspective (Study 5), and the experience of a performance can change by considering how fans or nonfans would see it (Study 7). Blind to the power of construal in defining their experiences, participants believed they were learning about a stimulus's properties or their own underlying preferences, not simply the experience-distorting effects of the perspective manipulations (Studies 6-7). These effects emerged in examinations of positive emotions, negative emotions, interest, and perceptions of humor. The final 2 pairs of studies used causal chain designs to elucidate an underlying mechanism. Trying to understand another's perspective encouraged participants to approach a stimulus by posing different questions or directional hypotheses to themselves (Studies 8a and 9a), which caused participants' own experiences of the stimulus to shift (Studies 8b and 9b). The implications of this account for when considering another's perspective should change one's own experience are detailed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Paying more when paying for others.

Social behavior is heavily influenced by the perception of the behaviors of others. We considered how perceptions (and misperceptions) of kindness can increase generosity in economic transactions. We investigated how these perceptions can alter behavior in a novel real-life situation that pitted kindness against selfishness. That situation, consumer elective pricing, is defined by an economic transaction allowing people to purchase goods or services for any price (including zero). Field and lab experiments compared how people behave in 2 financially identical circumstances: pay-what-you-want (in which people are ostensibly paying for themselves) and pay-it-forward (in which people are ostensibly paying on behalf of someone else). In 4 field experiments, people paid more under pay-it-forward than pay-what-you-want (Studies 1-4). Four subsequent lab studies assessed whether the salience of others explains the increased payments (Study 5), whether ability to justify lowered payments (Study 6), and whether the manipulation was operating through changing the perceptions of others (Studies 7 and 8). When people rely on ambiguous perceptions, pay-it-forward leads to overestimating the kindness of others and a corresponding increase in personal payment. When those perceptions are replaced with explicit descriptive norms (i.e., others' payment amounts), that effect is eliminated. Finally, subsequent studies confirmed that the effects were not driven by participant confusion (Studies 9A and 9B) and not limited by the specificity of the referent other in the pay-it-forward framing (Study 9C).