Ed O'Brien

More Than Skin Deep Visceral States Are Not Projected Onto Dissimilar Others

What people feel shapes their perceptions of others. In the studies reported here, we examined the assimilative influence of visceral states on social judgment. Replicating prior research, we found that participants who were outside during winter overestimated the extent to which other people were bothered by cold (Study 1), and participants who ate salty snacks without water thought other people were overly bothered by thirst (Study 2). However, in both studies, this effect evaporated when participants believed that the other people under consideration held political views opposing their own. Participants who judged these dissimilar others were unaffected by their own strong visceral-drive states, a finding that highlights the power of dissimilarity in social judgment. Dissimilarity may thus represent a boundary condition for embodied cognition and inhibit an empathic understanding of shared out-group pain. Our findings reveal the need for a better understanding of how people’s internal experiences influence their perceptions of the feelings and experiences of those who may hold values different from their own.

Saving the Last for Best A Positivity Bias for End Experiences

Imagine that your favorite restaurant is closing, and your final meal tastes especially delicious. Is it actually more tasty than normal, or is it just more enjoyable because you know it is the last one? Previous research suggests that salient endings may foster more positive attitudes toward the events that preceded them. For example, students reminded of graduation felt greater affection for their school than did students not given such reminders (Ersner-Hershfield, Mikels, Sullivan, & Carstensen, 2008), and people who considered relocating valued their hometown friends more highly than did people who did not consider relocating (Fredrickson & Carstensen, 1990). However, “lasts” are also common in everyday life and need not involve significant experiences. For example, on a typical day, someone might read the last chapter of a book, eat the last bite of lunch, listen to the last symposium speaker, and give the last kiss goodnight. In turn, he or she may assess the quality of each event (e.g., “How interesting was that final talk?”). When made salient, serial positioning may affect such assessments; this occurs because people are highly sensitive to temporal contexts, which influence many evaluations besides major life episodes (Aaker, Rudd, & Mogilner, 2011; Levine, 1997; McGrath & Tschan, 2004). Thus, just as graduations trigger more positive perceptions of school, people might judge everyday “last” events more positively because they generally signal the end of an experience. To test this possibility, we recruited participants to eat different flavors of chocolates one by one. We predicted that when the last chocolate was made salient, it would be more enjoyable, and it would taste better than the other chocolates irrespective of flavor. We also predicted that when the last chocolate was made salient, the experiment would be more enjoyable overall, because endings drive global evaluations (as in duration neglect—Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996); in other words, if the last chocolate tastes better than the ones before it, the overall experience should seem better.

Happy You, Healthy Me? Having a Happy Partner Is Independently Associated With Better Health in Oneself.

Objective: Happy people are healthy people. However, past research has largely overlooked the influence of romantic partners’ happiness on physical health, particularly how a person’s own emotional and physical well-being might also be affected by the happiness and health of their partner. Method: The current study helps fill this gap. In a large nationally representative sample (N = 1,981 couples), a multilevel modeling procedure was employed to explore whether spousal life satisfaction contributes to self-health over and above the contribution of one’s own life satisfaction. Results: First, own happiness predicted better self-health and exercise (r values > .07), consistent with previous studies. Importantly, spousal happiness also uniquely predicted better self-health (r values > .06), above and beyond own happiness and critical covariates. Conclusions: This finding significantly broadens extant assumptions about the link between happiness and health, suggesting novel social mechanisms: simply having a happy partner may enhance health as much as striving to being happy oneself. Candidate pathways that could account for this unique boost are discussed.

The power and limits of personal change:: When a bad past does (and does not) inspire in the present.

Observing other people improve their lives can be a powerful source of inspiration. Eight experiments explore the power, limits, and reasons for this power of personal change to inspire. We find that people who have improved from undesirable pasts (e.g., people who used to abuse extreme drugs but no longer do) are more inspiring than people who maintain consistently desirable standings (e.g., people who have never used extreme drugs to begin with), because change is perceived as more effortful than stability (Experiments 1a and 1b). The inspirational power of personal change is rooted in people’s lack of access to the internal struggles and hard work that many others may endure to successfully remain ‘always-good.’ Accordingly, giving observers access into the effort underlying others’ success in maintaining consistently positive standings restores the inspiring power of being ‘always-good’ (Experiments 2–4). Finally, change is more inspiring than stability across many domains but one: people who used to harm others but have since reformed (e.g., ex-bullies or ex-cheaters) do not inspire, and in many cases are indeed less inspiring than people who have never harmed others to begin with (Experiments 5–7). Together, these studies reveal how, why, and when one’s past influences one’s present in the eyes of others: having some “bad” in your past can be surprisingly positive, at least partly because observers assume that becoming “good” is harder than being “good” all along.

The tipping point of perceived change:: Asymmetric thresholds in diagnosing improvement versus decline.

Change often emerges from a series of small doses. For example, a person may conclude that a happy relationship has eroded not from 1 obvious fight but from smaller unhappy signs that at some point “add up.” Everyday fluctuations therefore create ambiguity about when they reflect substantive shifts versus mere noise. Ten studies reveal an asymmetry in this first point when people conclude “official” change: people demand less evidence to diagnose lasting decline than lasting improvement, despite similar evidential quality. This effect was pervasive and replicated across many domains and parameters. For example, a handful of poor grades, bad games, and gained pounds led participants to diagnose intellect, athleticism, and health as “officially” changed; yet corresponding positive signs were dismissed as fickle flukes (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c). This further manifested in real-time reactions: participants interpreted the same graphs of change in the economy and public health as more meaningful if framed as depicting decline versus improvement (Study 2), and were more likely to gamble actual money on continued bad versus good luck (Study 3). Why? Effects held across self/other change, added/subtracted change, and intended/unintended change (Studies 4a, 4b, and 4c), suggesting a generalized negativity bias. Teasing this apart, we highlight a novel “entropy” component beyond standard accounts like risk aversion: good things seem more truly capable of losing their positive qualities than bad things seem capable of gaining them, rendering signs of decline to appear more immediately diagnostic (Studies 5 and 6). An asymmetric tipping point raises theoretical and practical implications for how people might inequitably react to smaller signs of change.