The effect of disease anthropomorphism on compliance with health recommendations.

Unlabelled: The present article examines how disease anthropomorphism affects compliance with recommendations for preventing the disease. We find that consumers are more likely to comply with health recommendations when the disease is described in anthropomorphic (vs. non-anthropomorphic) terms because anthropomorphism increases psychological closeness to the disease, which increases perceived vulnerability.

Helping Others by First Affirming the Self: When Self-Affirmation Reduces Ego-Defensive Downplaying of Others' Misfortunes.

We show that self-affirmation increases helping behavior toward others in need. We argue that as awareness of others' pain causes discomfort, individuals are often motivated to ignore information about such pain. However, ignoring others' suffering implies that one is not a good and caring person, which presents a threat to self-integrity.

The influence of perceived causation on judgments of time: an integrative review and implications for decision-making.

RECENT RESEARCH HAS SHOWN THAT THE PERCEPTION OF CAUSALITY AFFECTS THE JUDGMENT OF ELAPSED TIME: an interval between an action and a subsequent event seems to be shorter when people believe that action has caused the event. This article reviews past work on the phenomenon and integrates the findings from the different settings in which it has been observed. The effect is found for actions people have personally taken, as well as for those they have simply read or heard about.

Naïve theories of causal force and compression of elapsed time judgments.

Recent research has shown that when people perceive a causal relation between 2 events, they "compress" the intervening elapsed time. The present work shows that a naïve mechanical-physical conception of causality, in which causal forces are believed to dissipate over time, underlies the estimates of shorter elapsed time. Being primed with alternative, nondissipative causal mechanisms and having the cognitive capacity to consider such mechanisms moderates the compression effect.

Alignable and nonalignable differences in causal explanations.

Prior research indicates that people may base their causal explanations on distinctive features between an event and a contrasting background instance in which the event did not occur. Research on similarity judgments suggests that there are two types of distinctive features: alignable differences, which are corresponding characteristics of a pair, and nonalignable differences, which are characteristics of one item for which there are no corresponding characteristics in the other. In three experiments, the hypothesis that people's evaluations of causal explanations vary as a function of feature alignment was examined.