Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the original cognitive-appraisal dimensions (...) of the emotion. To pit the valence and appraisal-tendency approaches against one another, we present a study that addresses whether two emotions of the same valence but differing appraisals—anger and fear—relate in different ways to risk perception. Consistent with the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements. In the Discussion we expand the proposed model and review evidence supporting two social moderators of appraisal-tendency processes. (shrink)

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline‐based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5‐year‐olds could cluster knowledge (...) in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline‐based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined. (shrink)

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different (...) sort of externalism: an _active externalism_, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. (shrink)

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value (...) is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

What are 'emotions'? This book offers a balanced survey of facts and theory.

Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

When an attitude changes from A₁ to A₂, what happens to A₁? Most theories assume, at least implicitly, that the new attitude replaces the former one. The authors argue that a new attitude can override, but not replace, the old one, resulting in dual attitudes. Dual attitudes are defined as different evaluations of the same attitude object: an automatic, implicit attitude and an explicit attitude. The attitude that people endorse depends on whether they have the cognitive capacity to retrieve the (...) explicit attitude and whether this overrides their implicit attitude. A number of literatures consistent with these hypotheses are reviewed, and the implications of the dual-attitude model for attitude theory and measurement are discussed. For example, by including only explicit measures, previous studies may have exaggerated the ease with which people change their attitudes. Even if an explicit attitude changes, an implicit attitude can remain the same. (shrink)

Argues that although the phenomenon of negative recency in secondary memory is usually attributed to the reduced amount of rehearsal associated with recency items, this phenomenon can be explained by the adoption of a different type of processing for recency items. An experiment with 122 undergraduates is reported in which the recall of recency items was reduced in an immediate test, but increased in a subsequent test, under conditions in which the recency items could not be identified as such during (...) their presentation. Results support the conclusion that the mode of processing items for an immediate free-recall test is normally modified for recency items. ((c) 1997 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Natural myside bias is the tendency to evaluate propositions from within one's own perspective when given no instructions or cues (such as within-participants conditions) to avoid doing so. We defined the participant's perspective as their previously existing status on four variables: their sex, whether they smoked, their alcohol consumption, and the strength of their religious beliefs. Participants then evaluated a contentious but ultimately factual proposition relevant to each of these demographic factors. Myside bias is defined between-participants as the mean difference (...) in the evaluation of the proposition between groups with differing prior status on the variable. Whether an individual difference variable (such as cognitive ability) is related to the magnitude of the myside bias is indicated by whether the individual difference variable interacts with the between-participants status variable. In two experiments involving a total of over 1400 university students ( n = 1484) and eight different comparisons, we found very little evidence that participants of higher cognitive ability displayed less natural myside bias. The degree of myside bias was also relatively independent of individual differences in thinking dispositions. We speculate that ideas from memetic theory and dual-process theory might help to explain why natural myside bias is quite dissociated from individual difference variables. (shrink)

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve (...) complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. (shrink)

Change blindness is the striking failure to see large changes that normally would be noticed easily. Over the past decade this phenomenon has greatly contributed to our understanding of attention, perception, and even consciousness. The surprising extent of change blindness explains its broad appeal, but its counterintuitive nature has also engendered confusions about the kinds of inferences that legitimately follow from it. Here we discuss the legitimate and the erroneous inferences that have been drawn, and offer a set of requirements (...) to help separate them. In doing so, we clarify the genuine contributions of change blindness research to our understanding of visual perception and awareness, and provide a glimpse of some ways in which change blindness might shape future research. (shrink)

Tested the 2-process theory of detection, search, and attention presented by the current authors in a series of experiments. The studies demonstrate the qualitative difference between 2 modes of information processing: automatic detection and controlled search; trace the course of the learning of automatic detection, of categories, and of automatic-attention responses; and show the dependence of automatic detection on attending responses and demonstrate how such responses interrupt controlled processing and interfere with the focusing of attention. The learning of categories is (...) shown to improve controlled search performance. A general framework for human information processing is proposed. The framework emphasizes the roles of automatic and controlled processing. The theory is compared to and contrasted with extant models of search and attention. (shrink)

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real‐time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1–6. Then we show (...) differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7–10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition. (shrink)