Does 'When' really feel more certain than 'If'? Two failures to replicate Ballard and Lewandowsky (2015).

We report on two independent failures to conceptually replicate findings by Ballard & Lewandowsky (Ballard and Lewandowsky 2015 , 20140464 (doi:10.1098/rsta.2014.

Taking the high (or low) road: a quantifier priming perspective on basic anchoring effects.

Current explanations of basic anchoring effects, defined as the influence of an arbitrary number standard on an uncertain judgment, confound numerical values with vague quantifiers. I show that the consideration of numerical anchors may bias subsequent judgments primarily through the priming of quantifiers, rather than the numbers themselves. Study 1 varied the target of a numerical comparison judgment in a between--participants design, while holding the numerical anchor value constant.

Multifinality in implicit choice.

This research examines the possibility that people's choices in the service of an explicit focal goal may also reflect their tendency to fulfill implicit background goals and in that sense are multifinal. We carried out 5 experimental studies to investigate this notion. In Experiment 1, a primed implicit goal affected individuals' choices even when those avowedly served an explicit "focal" goal.

Seeing the world in black and white: the effects of perceptually induced mind-sets on judgment.

Three experiments examined the notion that rudimentary perceptual experiences can serve as powerful guides to judgments under uncertainty. The results show that exposure to certain perceptual contrast patterns can influence the direction of bias without conscious awareness. In Experiment 1a, perception of alternating black and white squares, which served as orientation markers in a lexical decision task, resulted in a reduction of the well-known anchoring bias.

Relevance override: on the reduced impact of "cues" under high-motivation conditions of persuasion studies.

This research addressed the reduced impact of cues under high processing motivation of persuasion experiments. The results of 3 studies suggested that such reduced impact is due to a relevance override whereby any more subjectively relevant information swamps the effects of any less subjectively relevant information, given the recipient's sufficient motivation to process both. Because, in much persuasion research, cues may have been perceived as less relevant to the attitudinal judgments than message arguments, the relevance override hypothesis provides a general explanation of the reduced cue effect.