Threshold violations in social judgment.

People commonly establish in advance the thresholds they use to pass social judgment (e.g., promising reward/punishment after a fixed number of good/bad behaviors). Ten preregistered experiments (N = 5,542) reveal when, why, and how people violate their social judgment thresholds, even after formally establishing them based on having full information about what might unfold. People can be swayed to be both "quicker to judge" (e.g., promising reward/punishment after 3 good/bad behaviors, yet then acting after 2 such behaviors) and "slower to judge" (e.g., promising reward/punishment after 3 good/bad behaviors, yet then withholding until 4 such behaviors)-despite all behaviors obeying their threshold. We document these discrepancies across many parameters. We also propose and test an integrative theoretical framework to explain them, rooted in psychological support: Being both "quicker" and "slower" to judge reflect a shared function of the distinct modes of evaluation involved in the act of setting social judgment thresholds (involving a packed summary judgment extending across myriad possible realities) versus following them in real time (involving an unpacked focus on whatever specific reality unfolds, which could provide higher or lower support than threshold setters had accounted for). Manipulating the degree of psychological support thus determines the direction of threshold violations: Higher support produces "quicker to judge" effects while lower support produces "slower to judge" effects. Finally, although violating one's preset threshold may sometimes be to one's benefit, we document initial evidence that it also risks damaging people's reputations and relationships. When it comes to treating others, making exceptions to the rule may often be the rule-for better or worse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Ending on a familiar note: Perceived endings motivate repeat consumption.

People fill their free time by choosing between hedonic activities that are new and exciting (e.g., exploring a buzzed-about restaurant) versus old and familiar (e.g., revisiting the same old spot). The dominant psychological assumption is that people will prefer novelty, holding constant factors like cost, availability, and convenience between acquiring such options ("variety is the spice of life"). Eight preregistered experiments (total N = 5,889) reveal that people's attraction to novelty depends, at least in part, on their temporal context-namely, on perceived endings. As participants faced a shrinking window of opportunity to enjoy a general category of experience (even merely temporarily; e.g., eating one's last dessert before starting a diet), their hedonic preferences shifted away from new and exciting options and toward old favorites. This relative shift emerged across many domains (e.g., food, travel, music), situations (e.g., impending New Year's resolutions, COVID-19 shutdowns), and consequential behaviors (e.g., choices with financial stakes). Using both moderation and mediation approaches, we found that perceived endings increase the preference for familiarity because they increase people's desire to ensure a personally meaningful experience on which to end, and returning to old favorites is typically more meaningful than exploring novelty. Endings increased participants' preference for familiarity even when it meant sacrificing other desirable attributes (e.g., exciting stimulation). Together, these findings advance and bridge research on hedonic preferences, time and timing, and the motivational effects of change. Variety may be the "spice of life," but familiarity may be the spice of life's endings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Losing Sight of Piecemeal Progress: People Lump and Dismiss Improvement Efforts That Fall Short of Categorical Change-Despite Improving.

Fourteen experiments (N = 10,556 adult participants, including more than 20,000 observed choices across 25 issues) documented how people perceive and respond to relative progress out in the world, revealing a robust "negative-lumping" effect. As problematic entities worked to better their ways, participants shifted to dismiss them if they fell short of categorical reform-despite distinctions in improvement. This increased dismissal of relative gains as "all the same" was driven by the belief that falling short signals an eschewal of doing the bare minimum and lacking serious intent to change, making these gains seem less deserving of recognition. Critically, participants then "checked out": They underrewarded and underinvested in efforts toward "merely" incremental improvement. Finally, in all experiments, participants lumped together absolute failures but not absolute successes, highlighting a unique blindness to gradations of badness. When attempts to eradicate a problem fail, people might dismiss smaller but critical steps that were and can still be made.

Keep talking: (Mis)understanding the hedonic trajectory of conversation.

People regularly interact with new acquaintances, yet little research has examined the hedonic dynamics of these conversations or the extent to which people are aware of them. Five preregistered laboratory experiments (N = 1,093 participants, including 966 spoken conversations) address these gaps. We find that people misunderstand the hedonic trajectory of conversation: After enjoying the initial minutes of conversation with a new acquaintance, participants expected their enjoyment to decline as their conversations continued, but experienced stable or increasing enjoyment in reality. This miscalibration arose at least partly because participants underestimated how much they would have to discuss. Thus, instructing participants to mentally simulate the conversation in detail drew their attention to the conversation material they could discuss and helped to calibrate their enjoyment predictions. When left uncorrected, misunderstanding the hedonic trajectory of conversation can undermine well-being. In one study, participants preferred to spend less time in conversation and more time alone than was optimal for their enjoyment-a finding that emerged even among participants who reported wanting to enjoy themselves. Throughout our experiments we assessed various conversational contexts (including whether participants had one long conversation with a single partner or several short conversations with different partners), and features of conversation (including participants' perceived and actual interest in talking to each other, fatigue, and the intimacy of conversation), thus shining novel light on conversational dynamics more broadly. People hold incorrect assumptions about how social interaction changes over time and, consequently, may avoid longer-lasting conversations that would forge closer connections. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Yesterday's News: A Temporal Discontinuity in the Sting of Inferiority.

Reactions to other people who get desirable outcomes should be a simple function of how much one desires those outcomes. Four studies ( N = 4,978) suggest that one's reactions depend on the temporal location of outcome acquisition: Observers care more (e.g., feel more envy) right before, versus right after, other people have identical experiences (Studies 1, 2a, and 2b). For example, participants' envy in February rose as Valentine's Day approached (as a peer's enviable date loomed in the future) but abruptly plateaued come February 15 onward (after the date occurred). Further, the passing of time specifically assuaged the pain of comparison (whereas positive reactions, such as feeling inspired, remained high; Studies 3a, 3b, and 3c); therefore, taking a past perspective can be used to regulate negative emotions in the present (Study 4). Time asymmetrically shapes the experience of upward comparison, despite other people's desirable outcomes indeed being achieved. Other people's good lives sting less if they have already lived them.

Enjoy it again: Repeat experiences are less repetitive than people think.

What would it be like to revisit a museum, restaurant, or city you just visited? To rewatch a movie you just watched? To replay a game you just played? People often have opportunities to repeat hedonic activities. Seven studies (total N = 3,356) suggest that such opportunities may be undervalued: Many repeat experiences are not as dull as they appear. Studies 1-3 documented the basic effect. All participants first completed a real-world activity once in full (Study 1, museum exhibit; Study 2, movie; Study 3, video game). Then, some predicted their reactions to repeating it whereas others actually repeated it. Predictors underestimated Experiencers' enjoyment, even when experienced enjoyment indeed declined. Studies 4 and 5 compared mechanisms: neglecting the pleasurable byproduct of continued exposure to the same content (e.g., fluency) versus neglecting the new content that manifests by virtue of continued exposure (e.g., discovery), both of which might dilute uniform dullness. We found stronger support for the latter: The misprediction was moderated by stimulus complexity (Studies 4 and 5) and mediated by the amount of novelty discovered within the stimulus (Study 5), holding exposure constant. Doing something once may engender an inflated sense that one has now seen "it," leaving people naïve to the missed nuances remaining to enjoy. Studies 6 and 7 highlighted consequences: Participants incurred costs to avoid repeats so to maximize enjoyment, in specific contexts for which repetition would have been as enjoyable (Study 6) or more enjoyable (Study 7) as the provided novel alternative. These findings warrant a new look at traditional assumptions about hedonic adaptation and novelty preferences. Repetition too could add an unforeseen spice to life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Unconventional Consumption Methods and Enjoying Things Consumed: Recapturing the "First-Time" Experience.

People commonly lament the inability to re-experience familiar things as they were first experienced. Four experiments suggest that consuming familiar things in new ways can disrupt adaptation and revitalize enjoyment. Participants better enjoyed the same familiar food (Experiment 1), drink (Experiment 2), and video (Experiments 3a-3b) simply when re-experiencing the entity via unusual means (e.g., eating popcorn using chopsticks vs. hands). This occurs because unconventional methods invite an immersive "first-time" perspective on the consumption object: boosts in enjoyment were mediated by revitalized immersion into the consumption experience and were moderated by time such that they were strongest when using unconventional methods for the first time (Experiments 1-2); likewise, unconventional methods that actively disrupted immersion did not elicit the boost, despite being novel (Experiments 3a-3b). Before abandoning once-enjoyable entities, knowing to consume old things in new ways (vs. attaining new things altogether) might temporarily restore enjoyment and postpone wasteful replacement.

People Are Slow to Adapt to the Warm Glow of Giving.

People adapt to repeated getting. The happiness we feel from eating the same food, from earning the same income, and from many other experiences quickly decreases as repeated exposure to an identical source of happiness increases. In two preregistered experiments ( N = 615), we examined whether people also adapt to repeated giving-the happiness we feel from helping other people rather than ourselves. In Experiment 1, participants spent a windfall for 5 days ($5.00 per day on the same item) on themselves or another person (the same one each day). In Experiment 2, participants won money in 10 rounds of a game ($0.05 per round) for themselves or a charity of their choice (the same one each round). Although getting elicited standard adaptation (happiness significantly declined), giving did not grow old (happiness did not significantly decline; Experiment 1) and grew old more slowly than equivalent getting (happiness declined at about half the rate; Experiment 2). Past research suggests that people are inevitably quick to adapt in the absence of change. These findings suggest otherwise: The happiness we get from giving appears to sustain itself.

People use less information than they think to make up their minds.

A world where information is abundant promises unprecedented opportunities for information exchange. Seven studies suggest these opportunities work better in theory than in practice: People fail to anticipate how quickly minds change, believing that they and others will evaluate more evidence before making up their minds than they and others actually do. From evaluating peers, marriage prospects, and political candidates to evaluating novel foods, goods, and services, people consume far less information than expected before deeming things good or bad. Accordingly, people acquire and share too much information in impression-formation contexts: People overvalue long-term trials, overpay for decision aids, and overwork to impress others, neglecting the speed at which conclusions will form. In today's information age, people may intuitively believe that exchanging ever-more information will foster better-informed opinions and perspectives-but much of this information may be lost on minds long made up.

Easier Seen Than Done: Merely Watching Others Perform Can Foster an Illusion of Skill Acquisition.

Modern technologies such as YouTube afford unprecedented access to the skilled performances of other people. Six experiments ( N = 2,225) reveal that repeatedly watching others can foster an illusion of skill acquisition. The more people merely watch others perform (without actually practicing themselves), the more they nonetheless believe they could perform the skill, too (Experiment 1). However, people's actual abilities-from throwing darts and doing the moonwalk to playing an online game-do not improve after merely watching others, despite predictions to the contrary (Experiments 2-4). What do viewers see that makes them think they are learning? We found that extensive viewing allows people to track what steps to take (Experiment 5) but not how those steps feel when taking them. Accordingly, experiencing a "taste" of performing attenuates the illusion: Watching others juggle but then holding the pins oneself tempers perceived change in one's own ability (Experiment 6). These findings highlight unforeseen problems for self-assessment when watching other people.

Worth the Wait? Leisure Can Be Just as Enjoyable With Work Left Undone.

Four studies reveal that (a) people hold a robust intuition about the order of work and leisure and that (b) this intuition is sometimes mistaken. People prefer saving leisure for last, believing they would otherwise be distracted by looming work (Study 1). In controlled experiments, however, although subjects thought their enjoyment would be spoiled when they played a game before rather than after a laborious problem-solving task, got a massage before rather than after midterms, and consumed snacks and watched videos before rather than after a stressful performance, in reality these experiences were similarly enjoyable regardless of order (Studies 2 through 4). This misprediction was indeed mediated by anticipated distraction and was therefore attenuated after people were reminded of the absorbing nature of enjoyable activities (Studies 3 and 4). These studies highlight the power of hedonic experience within the moment of consumption, which has implications for managing (or mismanaging) everyday work and leisure. People might postpone leisure and overwork for future rewards that could be just as pleasurable in the present.

The power and limits of personal change: When a bad past does (and does not) inspire in the present.

Observing other people improve their lives can be a powerful source of inspiration. Eight experiments explore the power, limits, and reasons for this power of personal change to inspire. We find that people who have improved from undesirable pasts (e.g., people who used to abuse extreme drugs but no longer do) are more inspiring than people who maintain consistently desirable standings (e.g., people who have never used extreme drugs to begin with), because change is perceived as more effortful than stability (Experiments 1a and 1b). The inspirational power of personal change is rooted in people's lack of access to the internal struggles and hard work that many others may endure to successfully remain 'always-good.' Accordingly, giving observers access into the effort underlying others' success in maintaining consistently positive standings restores the inspiring power of being 'always-good' (Experiments 2-4). Finally, change is more inspiring than stability across many domains but one: people who used to harm others but have since reformed (e.g., ex-bullies or ex-cheaters) do not inspire, and in many cases are indeed less inspiring than people who have never harmed others to begin with (Experiments 5-7). Together, these studies reveal how, why, and when one's past influences one's present in the eyes of others: having some "bad" in your past can be surprisingly positive, at least partly because observers assume that becoming "good" is harder than being "good" all along. (PsycINFO Database Record

The tipping point of perceived change: Asymmetric thresholds in diagnosing improvement versus decline.

Change often emerges from a series of small doses. For example, a person may conclude that a happy relationship has eroded not from 1 obvious fight but from smaller unhappy signs that at some point "add up." Everyday fluctuations therefore create ambiguity about when they reflect substantive shifts versus mere noise. Ten studies reveal an asymmetry in this first point when people conclude "official" change: people demand less evidence to diagnose lasting decline than lasting improvement, despite similar evidential quality. This effect was pervasive and replicated across many domains and parameters. For example, a handful of poor grades, bad games, and gained pounds led participants to diagnose intellect, athleticism, and health as "officially" changed; yet corresponding positive signs were dismissed as fickle flukes (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c). This further manifested in real-time reactions: participants interpreted the same graphs of change in the economy and public health as more meaningful if framed as depicting decline versus improvement (Study 2), and were more likely to gamble actual money on continued bad versus good luck (Study 3). Why? Effects held across self/other change, added/subtracted change, and intended/unintended change (Studies 4a, 4b, and 4c), suggesting a generalized negativity bias. Teasing this apart, we highlight a novel "entropy" component beyond standard accounts like risk aversion: good things seem more truly capable of losing their positive qualities than bad things seem capable of gaining them, rendering signs of decline to appear more immediately diagnostic (Studies 5 and 6). An asymmetric tipping point raises theoretical and practical implications for how people might inequitably react to smaller signs of change. (PsycINFO Database Record

Happy you, healthy me? Having a happy partner is independently associated with better health in oneself.

OBJECTIVE: Happy people are healthy people. However, past research has largely overlooked the influence of romantic partners' happiness on physical health, particularly how a person's own emotional and physical well-being might also be affected by the happiness and health of their partner. METHOD: The current study helps fill this gap. In a large nationally representative sample (N = 1,981 couples), a multilevel modeling procedure was employed to explore whether spousal life satisfaction contributes to self-health over and above the contribution of one's own life satisfaction. RESULTS: First, own happiness predicted better self-health and exercise (r values > .07), consistent with previous studies. Importantly, spousal happiness also uniquely predicted better self-health (r values > .06), above and beyond own happiness and critical covariates. CONCLUSIONS: This finding significantly broadens extant assumptions about the link between happiness and health, suggesting novel social mechanisms: simply having a happy partner may enhance health as much as striving to being happy oneself. Candidate pathways that could account for this unique boost are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

The implicit meaning of (my) change.

The concept of change simply entails the totality of ways in which a particular entity has grown better and grown worse. Five studies suggest that this is not how people actually understand it for themselves. Rather, when asked to assess how they have "changed" over time, people bring to mind only how they have improved and neglect other trajectories (e.g., decline) that they have also experienced; global change is specifically translated as directional change for the better. This tendency emerged across many populations, time frames, measures, and methodologies (Studies 1-3), and led to important downstream effects: people who reflected on "change" from their pasts experienced enhanced mood, meaning, and satisfaction in their presents, precisely because they had assumed to only think about personal improvement (Study 4). A final study shed light on mechanisms: people evaluated the word change in a speeded response task as more positive when they were instructed to interpret the word in relation to themselves versus a friend, while no differences emerged between conditions for nonchange control words (Study 5). This suggests that the basic pattern across studies stems (at least partly) from traditional self-enhancement motives-our own change spontaneously brings to mind only the ways in which we have improved, whereas change in someone else is not so immediately and uniformly associated with improvement. Taken together, these findings reveal novel insights into the content and consequences of change perception, and they more broadly highlight unforeseen biases in when and why people might subjectively (mis)interpret otherwise objective constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mapping out past and future minds: The perceived trajectory of rationality versus emotionality over time.

Who do we see when envisioning our "past self" and "future self"? Extant research finds a motivation to perceive improvement over time, such that past selves are seen as worse versions, and future selves as better versions, of current selves. However, the broader components comprising "worse" or "better" beyond domain-specific achievement (e.g., "Last year I failed at dieting, but next year I'll succeed") are less well understood. Are there more general qualities ascribed to the person we recall versus imagine being? Six studies suggest so, extending the 2-dimensional mind perception framework to the self: Past selves seem to possess highly emotional but not very rational minds, whereas future selves seem to possess highly rational but not very emotional minds (Studies 1a, 1b, 1c). Consistent with motivated improvement, this asymmetry does not emerge in evaluating others and applies uniquely to self-judgment (Study 2). Thus, our pervasive belief in changing for the "better" specifically means becoming more rational types of people. This observation has asymmetric consequences. Participants who brought to mind future selves sought intellectual enrichment (Study 3) and performed better on a self-control task (Study 4); however, participants who brought to mind past selves sought emotional enrichment and performed better on the same task when allegedly measuring enjoyment. These findings build a bridge between mind perception and intertemporal dynamics, raising novel implications for the present. Thinking about the future may not uniformly "improve" decisions and behaviors; rather, it mostly facilitates rational-related pursuits, whereas thinking about the past may enhance feeling-related experiences.

Feeling connected to younger versus older selves: the asymmetric impact of life stage orientation.

The concept of life-stage orientation is proposed. Youth is a period of time characterised by strong feelings and emotions, but weak reasoning and cognitive skill. Conversely, adulthood is characterised by strong rationality, but weak emotionality. Two studies revealed that merely bringing these concepts to mind changes real-time feelings and behaviour. Participants who were instructed to act like their "adult" selves exhibited greater self-control in a cold pressor test than control participants and those who acted like their "youth" selves (Experiment 1). However, being induced to feel connected to youth enhanced enjoyment for fun videos (Experiment 2). Hence, the extent to which people are oriented towards youth versus adulthood has asymmetric costs and benefits for the present. Connecting to youth boosts experiential capacities (in this case, enjoying oneself) at the cost of agency, whereas connecting to adulthood boosts agentic capacities (in this case, exerting will-power) at the cost of experience.

Changes in adult attachment styles in American college students over time: a meta-analysis.

The current article examines changes over time in a commonly used measure of adult attachment style. A cross-temporal meta-analysis was conducted on 94 samples of American college students (total N = 25,243, between 1988 and 2011) who chose the most representative description of four possible attachment styles (Secure, Dismissing, Preoccupied, and Fearful) on the Relationship Questionnaire. The percentage of students with Secure attachment styles has decreased in recent years (1988: 48.98%; 2011: 41.62%), whereas the percentage of students with Insecure attachment styles (sum of Dismissing, Preoccupied, Fearful) has increased in recent years (1988: 51.02%; 2011: 58.38%). The percentage of students with Dismissing attachment styles has increased over time (1988: 11.93%; 2011: 18.62%), even after controlling for age, gender, race, and publication status. Positive views of others have declined across the same time period. We discuss possible implications and explanations for these changes.

Too much experience: a desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking.

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.

The thrill of (absolute) victory: success among many enhances emotional payoffs.

The emotional value of placing in a given percentile of a competition (e.g., placing in the "top 10%") depends on how many competitors are involved. Five studies reveal that winning among larger groups is associated with more positive emotional reactions than winning among smaller groups, even when the objective chances for success are held constant. Participants thought that a runner would feel happier after placing in the top 10% in a race with many (vs. few) competitors (Experiment 1); participants who imagined placing in the top 10% of a trivia quiz predicted that they would feel happier after succeeding among many (vs. few) respondents (Experiment 2); and participants who were given randomly assigned false feedback that they placed in the top 10% of a real creativity challenge actually felt happier when the pool was described as containing many (vs. few) contestants (Experiment 3). This effect appears to be driven by participants' intuitions about the statistical law of large numbers: when people think about success among large pools, they infer that the outcome is more diagnostic of "true" abilities--that the performance must not be a fluke--compared with identical success among small pools, which provides an affective boost (Experiments 4-5).