Elasticity of emotions to multiple interpersonal transgressions.

After an interpersonal mishap-like blowing off plans with a friend, forgetting a spouse's birthday, or falling behind on a group project-wrongdoers typically feel guilty for their misbehavior, and victims feel angry. These emotions are believed to possess reparative functions; their expression prevents future mistakes from reiterating. However, little research has examined people's emotional reactions to mistakes that happen more than once.

The biography of discovery: How unintentional discovery of resources influences choice and preference.

An archeologist discovers a 1,500-year-old Viking sword at the bottom of a lake. Would people be more drawn to the sword if they knew that the discovery was intentional, or unintentional? The current research examines this previously unexplored type of biographical narrative-the biography of the discovery of historical and natural resources. We propose that unintentionality in the discovery of a resource can shape choice and preference.

Unintentional Inception: When a Premium Is Offered to Unintentional Creations.

Creations can be fundamentally intended or unintended from their outset. Past work has focused on intentional creations, finding that people place a premium on effort. We examine the role of unintentionality in the inception of creations in six studies using a variety of stimuli ( = 1,965), finding that people offer a premium to unintentional creations versus otherwise identical intentional creations.

Choice protection for feeling-focused decisions.

Whether guided by feelings or deliberation, most decisions entail selecting an option and then living with it. Beyond simply investigating which option people select and how they evaluate it right away, the present research examines the extended issue of how people think and act in the service of that choice as a function of how they decided in the first place. We propose that reliance on feelings over deliberation in making an initial decision will strengthen postchoice protection of chosen options against threats.

Feeling certain: Gut choice, the true self, and attitude certainty.

Decisions need not always be deliberative. Instead, people confronting choices can recruit their gut feelings, processing information about choice options in accordance with how they feel about options rather than what they think about them. Reliance on feelings can change what people choose, but might this decision strategy also impact how people evaluate their chosen options? The present investigation tackles this question by integrating insights from the separate literatures on the true self and attitude certainty.

The good and bad of ambivalence: Desiring ambivalence under outcome uncertainty.

Decades of past research point to the downside of evaluative inconsistency (i.e., ambivalence), suggesting that it is an unpleasant state that can result in negative affect.

Pressure and perverse flights to familiarity.

Under pressure, people often prefer what is familiar, which can seem safer than the unfamiliar. We show that such favoring of familiarity can lead to choices precisely contrary to the source of felt pressure, thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating, its negative consequences. In Experiment 1, time pressure increased participants' frequency of choosing to complete a longer but incidentally familiar task option (as opposed to a shorter but unfamiliar alternative), resulting in increased felt stress during task completion.

Perceptual accuracy and conflicting effects of certainty on risk-taking behaviour.

The 'certainty effect' is a notable violation of expected utility theory by decision makers. It shows that people's tendency to select the safer of two prospects increases when this prospect provides a good outcome with certainty (for example, people prefer a monetary gain of 3 with certainty over 4 with a probability of 0.8, but do not prefer 3 with a probability of 0.