Future Shock
Julie Huang, Hyunjin Song & John Bargh
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines how processing fluency influences people's perceptions of whether a trend will continue into the future. Specifically, two studies hypothesized that people who read descriptions of increasing or decreasing trends in easy-to-read font would be more likely to predict that the trend would continue into the future, compared to people exposed to difficult-to-read font. Studies 1 and 2 establish this effect for an increasing trend, whereas Study 3 replicates the findings with a decreasing trend. Taken together, these results suggest processing fluency as a factor that affects assessment of future potential.
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Annette Bohn & Dorthe Berntsen
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The reminiscence bump - the reporting of more memories from young adulthood than from other stages of life - is considered a hallmark of autobiographical memory research. The most prevalent explanations for this effect assume that events in young adulthood are favored because of the way they are encoded and maintained in long-term memory. Here we show that a similar increase of events in early adulthood is found when children narrate their personal futures. In Study 1, children wrote their future life stories. The events in these life stories were mostly life-script events, and their distribution showed a clear bump in young adulthood. In Study 2, children were prompted by word cues to write down events from their future lives. The events generated consisted mostly of non-life-script events, and those events did not show a bump in young adulthood. Our findings challenge prevailing explanations of the reminiscence bump and suggest that the cultural life script forms an overarching organizational principle for autobiographical memories and future representations across the life span.
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Older but not wiser - Predicting a partner's preferences gets worse with age
Benjamin Scheibehenne, Jutta Mata & Peter Todd
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
To test the influence of relationship length on ability to predict a partner's preferences, 58 younger (M = 24.1 years) and 20 older (M = 68.7 years) couples made predictions in three domains that varied in daily importance. While prediction accuracy was generally better than chance, longer relationship length correlated with lower prediction accuracy and greater overconfidence. The difference in accuracy between older and younger couples increased for strong preferences and when controlling for preference reliability over time. Independent of relationship length, prediction accuracy was higher for important domains, for strong, reliable, and stereotypical preferences, and when couples were more similar.
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Good Intentions, Optimistic Self-Predictions, and Missed Opportunities
Derek Koehler, Rebecca White & Leslie John
Social Psychological and Personality Science, January 2011, Pages 90-96
Abstract:
Self-predictions are highly sensitive to current intentions but often largely insensitive to factors influencing the readiness with which those intentions are translated into future behavior. When such factors are under a person's control, they could be used to increase the probability that desired future behavior will be undertaken, but they will be underused if self-predictions underestimate their impact. This hypothesis was borne out in two experiments involving working students attempting to achieve a savings goal: They strongly intended to save, made overly optimistic self-predictions even when it was costly to do so, and were willing to pay very little for a service that could help them save more because they did not anticipate its impact on their future behavior. By contrast, students who were informed of the service's actual impact were willing to pay more for it, and students did not underestimate the impact of the service on fellow students.
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Regret Aversion and the Reluctance to Exchange Lottery Tickets
Niels van de Ven & Marcel Zeelenberg
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research finds that people are willing to forego a direct material gain, if that protects them from future regrets. In two experiments participants endowed with a lottery ticket were offered to exchange their ticket for another ticket from the same lottery. Even though they could receive a bonus for exchanging, many participants chose not to do so. Experiment 1 finds that a manipulation that prevented the anticipation of regret by offering the ticket in a sealed envelope made more participants exchange their ticket. Experiment 2 finds that an increased potential of regret over not-exchanging made more participants exchange as well. In both experiments the effect of the manipulation on choices is mediated by anticipated regret. The experiments show that people are willing to forego a material gain to prevent future regrets and that the reluctance to exchange lottery tickets is (partly) caused by regret aversion.
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Pay, productivity and aging in Major League Baseball
Jahn Hakes & Chad Turner
Journal of Productivity Analysis, February 2011, Pages 61-74
Abstract:
Using panels of player pay and performance from Major League Baseball (MLB), we examine trends in player productivity and salaries as players age. Pooling players of all ability levels leads to a systematic bias in regression coefficients. After addressing this problem by dividing players into talent quintiles, we find that the best players peak about 2 years later than marginal players, and development and depreciation of performance appear to be more pronounced for players with the highest ability levels. Within-career variation, however, is less pronounced than between-player variation, and the performance level of players within a given quintile will typically remain lower than the talent level for rookies in the next higher quintile. We also find preliminary evidence that free agents are paid proportionately to their production at all ability levels, whereas young players' salaries are suppressed by similar amounts.
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Destination memory impairment in older people
Nigel Gopie, Fergus Craik & Lynn Hasher
Psychology and Aging, December 2010, Pages 922-928
Abstract:
Older adults are assumed to have poor destination memory-knowing to whom they tell particular information-and anecdotes about them repeating stories to the same people are cited as informal evidence for this claim. Experiment 1 assessed young and older adults' destination memory by having participants tell facts (e.g., "A dime has 118 ridges around its edge") to pictures of famous people (e.g., Oprah Winfrey). Surprise recognition memory tests, which also assessed confidence, revealed that older adults, compared to young adults, were disproportionately impaired on destination memory relative to spared memory for the individual components (i.e., facts, faces) of the episode. Older adults also were more confident that they had not told a fact to a particular person when they actually had (i.e., a miss); this presumably causes them to repeat information more often than young adults. When the direction of information transfer was reversed in Experiment 2, such that the famous people shared information with the participants (i.e., a source memory experiment), age-related memory differences disappeared. In contrast to the destination memory experiment, older adults in the source memory experiment were more confident than young adults that someone had shared a fact with them when a different person actually had shared the fact (i.e., a false alarm). Overall, accuracy and confidence jointly influence age-related changes to destination memory, a fundamental component of successful communication.
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Andrew Fullerton & Jeffrey Dixon
Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 2010, Pages 643-673
Abstract:
In light of claims of a generational conflict over age-specific policies and the current fiscal troubles of related governmental programs, this article examines Americans' attitudes toward education, health, and Social Security spending through the use of a new methodology designed to uncover asymmetries in public opinion and disentangle age, period, and cohort effects. Based on generalized ordered logit models within a cross-classified fixed-effects framework using General Social Survey data between 1984 and 2008, we find little evidence consistent with gray peril and self-interest hypotheses suggesting that older people support spending for health care and Social Security but not education. The divide in attitudes toward education spending is the result of cohort - not age - effects. Yet these cohort effects extend to other attitudes and are asymmetrical: The so-called greatest generation (born around 1930 or earlier) is ambivalent about government spending and especially likely to say that we spend the "right amount" on health care. As people approach retirement age, they also become more likely to say that we spend the "right amount" on Social Security. The nuanced ways in which American public opinion is divided by age and cohort are uncovered only through the use of a new methodology that does not conceive of public support and opposition as symmetrical. Historical reasons for these divides, along with their contemporary implications, are discussed.
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John Petrocelli, Elise Percy, Steven Sherman & Zakary Tormala
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Counterfactual thoughts typically take the form of implied or explicit if-then statements. We propose that the multiplicative combination of "if likelihood" (the degree to which the antecedent condition of the counterfactual is perceived to be likely) and "then likelihood" (the perceived conditional likelihood of the outcome of the counterfactual, given the antecedent condition) determine the strength and impact of counterfactuals. This construct, termed counterfactual potency, is a reliable predictor of the degree of influence of counterfactual thinking upon judgments of regret, causation, and responsibility. Through 4 studies, we demonstrate the predictive power of this construct in a variety of contexts and show that it plays a causal role in determining the strength of the effects of counterfactual thought. Implications of counterfactual potency as a central factor of counterfactual influence are discussed.
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The evolutionary theory of time preferences and intergenerational transfers
C.Y. Cyrus Chu, Hung-Ken Chien & Ronald Lee
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, December 2010, Pages 451-464
Abstract:
At each age an organism produces energy by foraging and allocates this energy among reproduction, survival, growth, and intergenerational transfers. We characterize the optimal set of allocation decisions that maximizes fitness. Time preference (the discount rate) is derived from the marginal rate of substitution between energy obtained at two different times or ages, holding fitness constant. Time preference varies with age in different ways depending on whether an individual is immature or mature, and during the transition between these stages. We conclude that time preference and discount rates are likely to be U-shaped across age.