Advertisers’ increasing use of embedded advertising formats makes it more difficult for consumers to identify persuasive intents in advertiser messages. However, only if consumers identify these intents and categorize messages as advertising, can they activate advertising-specific reception strategies which might result in lessened persuasion effects. The fact that consumers regularly miss persuasive intents in non-traditional advertising environments, we suggest in this article, carries epistemological and methodical implications. To better appreciate these implications, we argue for a more systematic adoption of a (...) constructivist approach in advertising research. Some established concepts in advertising research such as the persuasion knowledge model and advertising literacy already implicitly follow a constructivist rationale. However, to more fully exploit the potential of a constructivist approach, we review communication concepts that inform advertising research, clarify why a constructivist approach increases the explanatory power of advertising research, and discuss challenges for research designs. (shrink)

The cheerleader effect describes the phenomenon whereby faces are perceived as being more attractive when flanked by other faces than when they are perceived in isolation. At least four theories predict the cheerleader effect. Two visual memory processes could cause a cheerleader effect. First, visual information will sometimes be averaged in the visual memory: the averaging of faces could increase the perceived attractiveness of all the faces flanked by other faces. Second, information will often be combined into a higher-order concept. (...) This hierarchical encoding suggests that information processing causes faces to appear more attractive when flanked by highly attractive faces. Two further explanations posit that comparison processes cause the cheerleader effect. While contrast effects predict that a difference between the target face and the flanking faces causes the cheerleader effect due to comparison processes, a change in the evaluation mode, which alters the standard of comparison between joint and separate evaluation of faces, could be sufficient for producing a cheerleader effect. This leads to the prediction that even when there is no contrast between the attractiveness of the target face and the flanking faces, a cheerleader effect could occur. The results of one experiment support this prediction. The findings of this study have practical implications, such as for individuals who post selfies on social media. An individual’s face will appear more attractive in a selfie taken with people of low attractiveness than in a selfie without other people, even when all the faces have equally low levels of attractiveness. (shrink)

To what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view places a heavy explanatory burden on an intelligent cognitive unconscious, with many theories assigning causally effective roles to unconscious influences. This article presents a novel framework for evaluating these claims and reviews evidence from three major bodies of research in which unconscious factors (...) have been studied: multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions under uncertainty. Studies of priming and the role of awareness in movement and perception are also given brief consideration. The review highlights that inadequate procedures for assessing awareness, failures to consider artifactual explanations of “landmark” results, and a tendency to uncritically accept conclusions that fit with our intuitions have all contributed to unconscious influences being ascribed inflated and erroneous explanatory power in theories of decision making. The review concludes by recommending that future research should focus on tasks in which participants' attention is diverted away from the experimenter's hypothesis, rather than the highly reflective tasks that are currently often employed. (shrink)

We propose the Selfish Goal model, which holds that a person's behavior is driven by psychological processes called goals that guide his or her behavior, at times in contradictory directions. Goals can operate both consciously and unconsciously, and when activated they can trigger downstream effects on a person's information processing and behavioral possibilities that promote only the attainment of goal end-states (and not necessarily the overall interests of the individual). Hence, goals influence a person as if the goals themselves were (...) selfish and interested only in their own completion. We argue that there is an evolutionary basis to believe that conscious goals evolved from unconscious and selfish forms of pursuit. This theoretical framework predicts the existence of unconscious goal processes capable of guiding behavior in the absence of conscious awareness and control (theautomaticity principle), the ability of the most motivating or active goal to constrain a person's information processing and behavior toward successful completion of that goal (thereconfiguration principle), structural similarities between conscious and unconscious goal pursuit (thesimilarity principle), and goal influences that produce apparent inconsistencies or counterintuitive behaviors in a person's behavior extended over time (theinconsistency principle). Thus, we argue that a person's behaviors are indirectly selected at the goal level but expressed (and comprehended) at the individual level. (shrink)

The target article sought to question the common belief that our decisions are often biased by unconscious influences. While many commentators offer additional support for this perspective, others question our theoretical assumptions, empirical evaluations, and methodological criteria. We rebut in particular the starting assumption that all decision making is unconscious, and that the onus should be on researchers to prove conscious influences. Further evidence is evaluated in relation to the core topics we reviewed (multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions (...) under uncertainty), as well as priming effects. We reiterate a key conclusion from the target article, namely, that it now seems to be generally accepted that awareness should be operationally defined as reportable knowledge, and that such knowledge can only be evaluated by careful and thorough probing. We call for future research to pay heed to the different ways in which awareness can intervene in decision making (as identified in our lens model analysis) and to employ suitable methodology in the assessment of awareness, including the requirements that awareness assessment must be reliable, relevant, immediate, and sensitive. (shrink)

Order of information plays a crucial role in the process of updating beliefs across time. In fact, the presence of order effects makes a classical or Bayesian approach to inference difficult. As a result, the existing models of inference, such as the belief-adjustment model, merely provide an ad hoc explanation for these effects. We postulate a quantum inference model for order effects based on the axiomatic principles of quantum probability theory. The quantum inference model explains order effects by transforming a (...) state vector with different sequences of operators for different orderings of information. We demonstrate this process by fitting the quantum model to data collected in a medical diagnostic task and a jury decision-making task. To further test the quantum inference model, a new jury decision-making experiment is developed. Using the results of this experiment, we compare the quantum inference model with two versions of the belief-adjustment model, the adding model and the averaging model. We show that both the quantum model and the adding model provide good fits to the data. To distinguish the quantum model from the adding model, we develop a new experiment involving extreme evidence. The results from this new experiment suggest that the adding model faces limitations when accounting for tasks involving extreme evidence, whereas the quantum inference model does not. Ultimately, we argue that the quantum model provides a more coherent account for order effects that was not possible before. (shrink)

In previous experiments on unconscious thought, information was presented to participants in one continuous session; however, in daily life, information is delivered in a temporally partitioned way. We examined whether unconscious thought could equally integrate temporally scattered information when making overall evaluations. When presenting participants with information in two temporally partitioned sessions, participants’ overall evaluation was based on neither the information in the first session nor that in the second session ; instead, information in both sessions were equally integrated to (...) reach a final judgment. Conscious thought, however, overemphasized information in the second session. Experiments 3 and 4 further ruled out possible influencing factors including differences in the distributions of positive/negative attributes in the first and second sessions and on-line judgment. These findings suggested that unconscious thought can integrate information from a wider range of periods during an evaluation, while conscious thought cannot. (shrink)

During the 1970s and 1980s, political psychologists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook focused political scientists’ attention on online processing. Borrowing from the new field of social cognition in psychology, they argued that voters’ evaluations of candidates are the products of a summing up of reactions to happenings during a campaign. Voters might not remember the specific events later on, but their running tallies of reactions over the duration of the campaign would ensure that they take (...) the forgotten information into account when entering the voting booth. Later, these same scholars yet again borrowed from (a very changed) psychology, and argued that many people, especially the most politically sophisticated, try to confirm their current political evaluations—for example, by seeking out confirmatory evidence and dismissing evidence that challenges their attitudes. We ask whether online processing and motivated reasoning have the same or different implications for democratic governance, and whether the two empirical perspectives can be reconciled. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman argues that the warrant for the lay attribution of character traits is completely undermined by the “fundamental attribution error” (FAE). He takes it to have been established by social psychologists, that the FAE pervades ordinary instances of lay person perception. However, examination of recent work in psychology reveals that there are good reasons to doubt that the effects observed in experimental settings, which ground the case for the FAE, pervade ordinary instances of person perception. Furthermore, it is possible (...) to make sense of these experimental results without invoking the FAE. Harman's argument against lay character trait attribution is unsubstantiated. (shrink)

In this article, the authors review a contemporary social psychological perspective on persuasion with an emphasis on explicating the psychological processes that underlie successful attitude change. Those mechanisms by which variables in the persuasion setting can influence attitude change are: affect the amount of information processing; bias the thoughts that are generated or one’s confidence in those thoughts ; serve as persuasive arguments or evidence or affect attitudes by serving as simple cues and heuristics. By grouping the persuasion processes into (...) meaningful categories, the authors aim to provide a useful guide to organize and facilitate access to key findings in this literature. They also describe a theoretical framework to understand the circumstances for which the different processes are more likely to influence our judgments, such as when variables precede or follow thought-generation, and when the extent of thinking is relatively low, medium, or high. (shrink)

In this article, the authors review a contemporary social psychological perspective on persuasion with an emphasis on explicating the psychological processes that underlie successful attitude change. Those mechanisms by which variables in the persuasion setting can influence attitude change are: (a) affect the amount of information processing; (b) bias the thoughts that are generated or (c) one’s confidence in those thoughts (or other structural features); (d) serve as persuasive arguments or evidence or (e) affect attitudes by serving as simple cues (...) and heuristics. By grouping the persuasion processes into meaningful categories, the authors aim to provide a useful guide to organize and facilitate access to key findings in this literature. They also describe a theoretical framework to understand the circumstances for which the different processes are more likely to influence our judgments, such as when variables precede or follow thought-generation, and when the extent of thinking is relatively low, medium, or high. (shrink)

. References. Critical Review: Vol. 18, Democratic Competence, pp. 331-360.

Three general issues emerge from the preceding papers: a confusion between judgement and related activities such as decision making, problem solving, and attitudes; differences in the underlying assumptions about the nature of judgement; and different approaches for testing the adequacy of theories human judgement. The implications of these issues for studying human judgement processes and for future research priorities in this area are briefly discussed.

This theoretical article investigates the effects of media frames on individuals' judgments. In contrast to previous theorizing, we suggest that framing scholars should embrace both, on-line and memory-based judgment formation processes. Based on that premise, we propose a model that distinguishes between two phases of framing effects. Along the first phase, the media's framing contributes to the formation of an on-line or a memory-based judgment. The second phase describes six hypothetical routes for the stability or the change of these judgments: (...) maintenance, readjustment, crystallization, inoculation, persuasion, and attenuation. At the heart of our model, we try to extract predictors for each of those routes. Finally, the implications of the proposed model for future framing research are discussed. (shrink)