When Saying Sorry May Not Help: The Impact of Apologies on Social Rejections.

If you have to socially reject someone, will it help to apologize? Social rejection is a painful emotional experience for targets, yet research has been silent on recommendations for rejectors. Across three sets of studies, apologies increased hurt feelings and the need to express forgiveness but did not increase feelings of forgiveness. The investigation of hurt feelings arising from a social rejection is challenging because previous research has shown that participants are reluctant to admit they felt hurt by the rejection.

There Are Many Ways to See the Forest for the Trees: A Tour Guide for Abstraction.

Abstraction is a useful process for broadening mental horizons, integrating new experiences, and communicating information to others. Much attention has been directed at identifying the causes and consequences of abstraction across the subdisciplines of psychology. Despite this attention, an integrative review of the methods that are used for studying abstraction is missing from the literature.

How do we want others to decide?: Geographical distance influences evaluations of decision makers.

People who decide on behalf of others can be located at various geographical distances from their clients and constituents. Across five experiments, we examined the role distance plays in evaluations of these decision makers. Specifically, drawing on construal level theory, we examined how the type of information (aggregate or case-specific) that closer and more distant decision makers cited as the basis for their decisions influenced how they were evaluated.