Behavioral science should start by assuming people are reasonable.

Should policymaking assume humans are irrational? Using empirical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments, we suggest a more useful frame is that human behavior is reasonable. Through identifying goals and systemic factors shaping behavior, we suggest that assuming people are reasonable enables behavioral science to be more effective in shaping public policy.

Social Power Increases Interoceptive Accuracy.

Building on recent psychological research showing that power increases self-focused attention, we propose that having power increases accuracy in perception of bodily signals, a phenomenon known as interoceptive accuracy. Consistent with our proposition, participants in a high-power experimental condition outperformed those in the control and low-power conditions in the Schandry heartbeat-detection task. We demonstrate that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is not explained by participants' physiological arousal, affective state, or general intention for accuracy.

Unrealistic comparative optimism: An unsuccessful search for evidence of a genuinely motivational bias.

One of the most accepted findings across psychology is that people are unrealistically optimistic in their judgments of comparative risk concerning future life events-they judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person. Harris and Hahn (2011), however, demonstrated how unbiased (non-optimistic) responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism due to statistical artifacts. In the current paper, we report the results of 5 studies that control for these statistical confounds and observe no evidence for residual unrealistic optimism, even observing a 'severity effect' whereby severe outcomes were overestimated relative to neutral ones (Studies 3 & 4).

Conceptual and direct replications fail to support the stake-likelihood hypothesis as an explanation for the interdependence of utility and likelihood judgments.

Previous research suggests that people systematically overestimate the occurrence of both positive and negative events, compared with neutral future events, and that these biases are due to a misattribution of arousal elicited by utility (stake-likelihood hypothesis; SLH; Vosgerau, 2010). However, extant research has provided only indirect support for these arousal misattribution processes. In the present research, we initially aimed to provide a direct test of the SLH by measuring arousal with galvanic skin responses to examine the mediating role of arousal.