George E. Newman

Art and Authenticity: The Importance of Originals in Judgments of Value

Why are original artworks valued more than identical duplicates? The present studies explore 2 mechanisms underlying the special value of original artwork: the assessment of the art object as a unique creative act (performance) and the degree of physical contact with the original artist (contagion). Across 5 experiments, participants were exposed to hypothetical scenarios in which an original object was duplicated. The type of object varied across experiments (e.g., a painting vs. a piece of furniture) as did the circumstances surrounding the creation of the original object and the duplicate. Overall, the results support assessments of performance and contagion as key factors underlying the value of original artwork, and they are consistent with the conclusion that the discrepancy in value between original artworks and perfect duplicates derives from peoples lay theories about the domain of art, rather than from associations with particular kinds of art or certain cases of forgery.

Value Judgments and the True Self

The belief that individuals have a “true self” plays an important role in many areas of psychology as well as everyday life. The present studies demonstrate that people have a general tendency to conclude that the true self is fundamentally good—that is, that deep inside every individual, there is something motivating him or her to behave in ways that are virtuous. Study 1 finds that observers are more likely to see a person’s true self reflected in behaviors they deem to be morally good than in behaviors they deem to be bad. Study 2 replicates this effect and demonstrates observers’ own moral values influence what they judge to be another person’s true self. Finally, Study 3 finds that this normative view of the true self is independent of the particular type of mental state (beliefs vs. feelings) that is seen as responsible for an agent’s behavior.

Tracing the identity of objects.

This article considers how people judge the identity of objects (e.g., how people decide that a description of an object at one time, t(0), belongs to the same object as a description of it at another time, t(1)). The authors propose a causal continuer model for these judgments, based on an earlier theory by Nozick (1981). According to this model, the 2 descriptions belong to the same object if (a) the object at t(1) is among those that are causally close enough to be genuine continuers of the original and (b) it is the closest of these close-enough contenders. A quantitative version of the model makes accurate predictions about judgments of which a pair of objects is identical to an original (Experiments 1 and 2). The model makes correct qualitative predictions about identity across radical disassembly (Experiment 1) as well as more ordinary transformations (Experiments 2 and 3).

Early understandings of the link between agents and order

The world around us presents two fundamentally different forms of patterns: those that appear random and those that appear ordered. As adults we appreciate that these two types of patterns tend to arise from very different sorts of causal processes. Typically, we expect that, whereas agents can increase the orderliness of a system, inanimate objects can cause only increased disorder. Thus, one major division in the world of causal entities is between those that are capable of “reversing local entropy” and those that are not. In the present studies we find that sensitivity to the unique link between agents and order emerges quite early in development. Results from three experiments suggest that by 12 mo of age infants associate agents with the creation of order and inanimate objects with the creation of disorder. Such expectations appear to be robust into childrens preschool years and are hypothesized to result from a more general understanding that agents causally intervene on the world in fundamentally different ways from inanimate objects.

Tainted Altruism When Doing Some Good Is Evaluated as Worse Than Doing No Good at All

In four experiments, we found that the presence of self-interest in the charitable domain was seen as tainting: People evaluated efforts that realized both charitable and personal benefits as worse than analogous behaviors that produced no charitable benefit. This tainted-altruism effect was observed in a variety of contexts and extended to both moral evaluations of other agents and participants’ own behavioral intentions (e.g., reported willingness to hire someone or purchase a company’s products). This effect did not seem to be driven by expectations that profits would be realized at the direct cost of charitable benefits, or the explicit use of charity as a means to an end. Rather, we found that it was related to the accessibility of different counterfactuals: When someone was charitable for self-interested reasons, people considered his or her behavior in the absence of self-interest, ultimately concluding that the person did not behave as altruistically as he or she could have. However, when someone was only selfish, people did not spontaneously consider whether the person could have been more altruistic.

Authenticity Is Contagious: Brand Essence and the Original Source of Production

It is well established that differences in manufacturing location can affect consumer preferences through lay inferences about production quality. In this article, the authors take a different approach to this topic by demonstrating how beliefs in contagion (the notion that objects may acquire a special aura or “essence” from their past) influence perceptions of authenticity for everyday consumer products and brands. Specifically, they find that due to a belief in contagion, products from a companys original manufacturing location are viewed as containing the essence of the brand. In turn, this belief in transferred essence leads consumers to view products from the original factory as more authentic and valuable than identical products made elsewhere. The authors further reveal that consumers who are higher in sensitivity to contagion are more likely to exhibit this effect and that activating the concept of contagion enhances preferences for products made in the brands original factory. The authors close by discussing theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Giving Versus Giving In

AbstractAltruism is central to organizational and social life, but its motivations are not well understood. We propose a new theoretical distinction that sorts these motivations into two basic type...

Eight-Month-Old Infants Infer Unfulfilled Goals, despite Ambiguous Physical Evidence.

In this study, we tested whether 8-month-old infants could infer an actors unfulfilled goal, despite some physical information present in the displays being inconsistent with the attempted goal. Infants saw a human hand holding a ring repeatedly approach the top of a plastic cone in an apparent failed attempt to place the ring on the cone. The hand and ring then bounced away from the top of the cone toward the floor. Thus, some information presented was relevant to the goal (the motion toward the goal, the afforded relationship between the ring and the cone, and the repeated attempt), but some of it was irrelevant to the goal (the movement away from the goal). Infants were presented with 2 test events: 1 that was consistent with all the trajectory information but inconsistent with the goal, and 1 that was consistent with the goal. Eight-month-olds looked longer to the trajectory-consistent event, suggesting they were able to infer the goal despite the physical ambiguity. Infants who had not been habituated to the failed attempt or who saw a matched inanimate control did not show this pattern, suggesting that infants in the first year of life actively and selectively analyze the unfulfilled goal-directed behavior of others.

Bar graphs depicting averages are perceptually misinterpreted: The within-the-bar bias

Perhaps the most common method of depicting data, in both scientific communication and popular media, is the bar graph. Bar graphs often depict measures of central tendency, but they do so asymmetrically: A mean, for example, is depicted not by a point, but by the edge of a bar that originates from a single axis. Here we show that this graphical asymmetry gives rise to a corresponding cognitive asymmetry. When viewers are shown a bar depicting a mean value and are then asked to judge the likelihood of a particular data point being part of its underlying distribution, viewers judge points that fall within the bar as being more likely than points equidistant from the mean, but outside the bar—as if the bar somehow “contained” the relevant data. This “within-the-bar bias” occurred (a) for graphs with and without error bars, (b) for bars that originated from both lower and upper axes, (c) for test points with equally extreme numeric labels, (d) both from memory (when the bar was no longer visible) and in online perception (while the bar was visible during the judgment), (e) both within and between subjects, and (f) in populations including college students, adults from the broader community, and online samples. We posit that this bias may arise due to principles of object perception, and we show how it has downstream implications for decision making.

The True Self: A Psychological Concept Distinct From the Self:

A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish people’s understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology.