Seven studies provide evidence of an availability bias in people’s assessments of the benefits they’ve enjoyed and the barriers they’ve faced. Barriers and hindrances command attention because they have to be overcome; benefits and resources can often be simply enjoyed and largely ignored. As a result of this “headwind/tailwind” asymmetry, Democrats and Republicans both claim that the electoral map works against them (Study 1), football...

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.  Franzoni, C., Scellato, G., & Stephan, P. (2014). The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists. Economics Letters, 122(1), 89-93.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2013.10.040    

Input from alien cultures might stimulate exceptional national achievements. This hypothesis was tested by applying generational time-series analysis to a society whose history shows tremendous variation in its receptiveness to the external world (viz., Japan between 580 and 1939). After required controls and data transformations were introduced, the cross-correlations were examined between 3 measures of extracultural influx (outside influence, travel abroad, and eminent immigrants) and...

This paper investigates whether travel increases the value of paintings produced by modern visual artists. The analysis is based on the 214 most prominent modern visual artists born between 1850 and 1945 and auction records of their paintings over the past 20 years. We find that artworks produced in the year of a journey are 7% more valuable than paintings produced in periods with no travel....

The present studies provide evidence that social-sampling processes lead wealthier people to oppose redistribution policies. In samples of American Internet users, wealthier participants reported higher levels of wealth in their social circles (Studies 1a and 1b). This was associated, in turn, with estimates of higher mean wealth in the wider U.S. population, greater perceived fairness of the economic status quo, and opposition to redistribution policies....

Numerous studies show that happy individuals are successful across multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health. The authors suggest a conceptual model to account for these findings, arguing that the happiness-success link exists not only because success makes people happy, but also because positive affect engenders success. Three classes of evidence--cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental--are documented to test their model. Relevant studies...

Construal level theory proposes that temporal distance changes people's responses to future events by changing the way people mentally represent those events. The greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events (high-level construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and incidental details of the events...

The present research investigated temporal dynamics between pleasure and meaning such that pleasure is favored in the near future, whereas meaning is favored in the distant future. As an underlying mechanism for this temporal effect, Study 1 demonstrated that pleasure was subordinate to meaning, suggesting that meaning constitutes a higher-level construal than pleasure. Consistent with construal level theory, Studies 2 and 3 found time-dependent changes...

Personal Projects Analysis (B. R. Little, 1983) was adapted to examine relations between participants' appraisals of their goal characteristics and orthogonal happiness and meaning factors that emerged from factor analyses of diverse well-being measures. In two studies with 146 and 179 university students, goal efficacy was associated with happiness and goal integrity was associated with meaning. A new technique for classifying participants according to emergent...

Nonprofit economists have always assumed that income is a precursor to giving. In contrast, many philosophical and religious teachings have asserted that it is giving that leads to prosperity. This article seeks to test the non-economic hypothesis, using data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. It identifies strong evidence that money giving does, in fact, influence income. This is consistent with extant psychology...