People prefer to make changeable decisions rather than unchangeable decisions because they do not realize that they may be more satisfied with the latter. Photography students believed that having the opportunity to change their minds about which prints to keep would not influence their liking of the prints. However, those who had the opportunity to change their minds liked their prints less than those who...

Intense hedonic states trigger psychological processes that are designed to attenuate them, and thus intense states may abate more quickly than mild states. Because people are unaware of these psychological processes, they may mistakenly expect intense states to last longer than mild ones. In Study 1, participants predicted that the more they initially disliked a transgressor, the longer their dislike would last. In Study 2,...

According to system justification theory, people are motivated to preserve the belief that existing social arrangements are fair, legitimate, justifiable, and necessary. The strongest form of this hypothesis, which draws on the logic of cognitive dissonance theory, holds that people who are most disadvantaged by the status quo would have the greatest psychological need to reduce ideological dissonance and would therefore be most likely to...

Responses by humans to painful electric shocks are significantly modified at subjective, behavioral, and physiological levels by verbal manipulations of degree of choice and justification for further exposure to the aversive stimuli. Pain perception, learning, and galvanic skin resistance are altered under these conditions of "cognitive dissonance," as they are by reductions in voltage intensity.  Zimbardo, P. G., Cohen, A. R., Weisenberg, M., Dworkin, L., &...

The current work explored the relations among reactance, regret, and behavioral choice. A possible mechanism for reactance in opposition to persuasion attempts involves people anticipating greater regret for negative outcomes after complying with an agent of persuasion than for negative outcomes after reacting against an agent of persuasion. Some participants were asked to anticipate regret prior to making a behavioral choice in the face of...

In choice between uncertain options, uncertainty may be eventually resolved for all options, or just for the chosen option. The findings described here demonstrate that preference between uncertain options is systematically affected by expectations concerning uncertainty resolution: Prospects which are less likely to yield worse outcome than the alternative are selected more often when all options are to be resolved (complete resolution). Two experiments examined...

Decisions are powerfully affected by anticipated regret, and people anticipate feeling more regret when they lose by a narrow margin than when they lose by a wide margin. But research suggests that people are remarkably good at avoiding self-blame, and hence they may be better at avoiding regret than they realize. Four studies measured people's anticipations and experiences of regret and self-blame. In Study 1,...

Investigated the mental control of mood and mood-related thought. In Exp 1, Ss reminiscing about a happy or sad event were asked to make their mood positive, were given no instructions, or were asked to make their mood negative. Ss attempting mood control without an imposed cognitive load were successful, whereas those who attempted control while rehearsing a 9-digit number not only failed to control...

The authors tested and confirmed the hypothesis that priming a stereotype or trait leads to complex overt behavior in line with this activated stereotype or trait. Specifically, 4 experiments established that priming the stereotype of professors or the trait intelligent enhanced participants' performance on a scale measuring general knowledge. Also, priming the stereotype of soccer hooligans or the trait stupid reduced participants' performance on a...

The present study examined the immediate and delayed effects of unobtrusive exposure to personality trait terms (e.g., “reckless”, “persistent”) on subjects' subsequent judgments and recollection of information about another person. Before reading a deion of a stimulus person, subjects were unobtrusively exposed to either positive or negative trait terms that either could or could not be used to characterize this person. When the trait terms...