Monetary and affective judgments of consumer goods: modes of evaluation matter.

Participants who evaluated 2 positively valued items separately reported more positive attraction (using affective and monetary measures) than those who evaluated the same two items as a unit. In Experiments 1-3, this separate/unitary evaluation effect was obtained when participants evaluated products that they were purchasing for a friend. Similar findings were obtained in Experiments 4 and 5 when we considered the amount participants were willing to spend to purchase insurance for items that they currently owned.

Prefactual potency: the perceived likelihood of alternatives to anticipated realities.

Prefactual thoughts typically take the form of implied or explicit if-then statements that represent mental simulations of alternatives to what is expected to occur in the future. The authors propose that the multiplicative combination of "if likelihood" (the degree to which the antecedent condition of the prefactual is perceived to be likely) and "then likelihood" (the perceived conditional likelihood of the outcome of the prefactual, given the antecedent condition) determine the influence of prefactuals. This construct, termed prefactual potency, is a reliable predictor of the degree of influence of prefactual thinking on judgments of anticipated negative affect.

Attributional biases in the service of stereotype maintenance: a schema-maintenance through compensation analysis.

Six experiments were conducted to test assumptions of a schema-maintenance through compensation analysis. The results of these experiments indicated that perceivers can compensate for the inconsistent action of one individual (the target) by altering their attribution concerning the action of a fellow group member. When the target performed an inconsistent behavior, perceivers compensated by making especially extreme stereotypically consistent attributions concerning a fellow group member's subsequent action.