A multinational analysis of how emotions relate to economic decisions regarding time or risk.

Emotions have been theorized to be important drivers of economic choices, such as intertemporal or risky decisions. Our systematic review and meta-analysis of the previous literature (378 results and 50,972 participants) indicates that the empirical basis for these claims is mixed and the cross-cultural generalizability of these claims has yet to be systematically tested. We analysed a dataset with representative samples from 74 countries (n = 77,242), providing a multinational test of theoretical claims that individuals' ongoing emotional states predict their economic preferences regarding time or risk.

What you are getting and what you will be getting: Testing whether verb tense affects intertemporal choices.

Prior research has shown that the way information is communicated can impact decisions, consistent with some forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language shapes thought. In particular, language structure-specifically the form of verb tense in that language-can predict savings behaviors among speakers of different languages. We test the causal effect of language structure encountered during financial decision-making, by manipulating the verb tense (within a single language) used to communicate intertemporal tradeoffs.

Incomplete grounding: the theory of symbolic separation is contradicted by pervasive stability in attitudes and behavior.

The proposed theory is broad enough to accommodate the reduction or elimination of prior influences by a variety of acts symbolizing separation (including cleansing). However, it does not account for stability in psychological variables, and is contradicted by widely documented stability in people's actual attitudes and behavior over time, in multiple domains, despite people's pervasive everyday acts of symbolic separation.

The role of causal beliefs in political identity and voting.

An emerging literature in psychology and political science has identified political identity as an important driver of political decisions. However, less is known about how a person's political identity is incorporated into their broader self-concept and why it influences some people more than others. We examined the role of political identity in representations of the self-concept as one determinant of people's political behaviors.

The Smile-Seeking Hypothesis: How Immediate Affective Reactions Motivate and Reward Gift Giving.

People making decisions for others often do not choose what their recipients most want. Prior research has generally explained such preference mismatches as decision makers mispredicting recipients' satisfaction. We proposed that a "smile-seeking" motive is a distinct cause for these mismatches in the context of gift giving.

The dynamic effect of incentives on postreward task engagement.

Although incentives can be a powerful motivator of behavior when they are available, an influential body of research has suggested that rewards can persistently reduce engagement after they end. This research has resulted in widespread skepticism among practitioners and academics alike about using incentives to motivate behavior change. However, recent field studies looking at the longer term effects of temporary incentives have not found such detrimental behavior.

Beliefs About the Causal Structure of the Self-Concept Determine Which Changes Disrupt Personal Identity.

Personal identity is an important determinant of behavior, yet how people mentally represent their self-concepts and their concepts of other people is not well understood. In the current studies, we examined the age-old question of what makes people who they are. We propose a novel approach to identity that suggests that the answer lies in people's beliefs about how the features of identity (e.

Making sense of nonsense: the visual salience of units determines sensitivity to magnitude.

When are people sensitive to the magnitude of numerical information presented in unfamiliar units, such as a price in a foreign currency or a measurement of an unfamiliar product attribute? We propose that people exhibit deliberational blindness, a failure to consider the meaning of even unfamiliar units. When an unfamiliar unit is not salient, people fail to take their lack of knowledge into account, and their judgments reflect sensitivity to the magnitude of the number. However, subtly manipulating the visual salience of the unit (e.