Jayati Sinha

Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness

Light and darkness have always been symbols of good and evil, respectively. In works ranging from popular movies and literature to the sacred texts of major world religions, the concepts of light and darkness have been used to convey the same messages. In the animated movie All Dogs Go to Heaven (Bluth, Goldman, & Pomeroy, 1989), heaven is depicted as a brightly lit place where the sun shines. Goodness is also associated with brightness and evil with darkness in some of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth wants to hide her evil deeds from heaven and from herself, she says, “Come, thick night/And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell/That my keen knife see not the wound it makes/Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark/To cry ‘Hold, hold!’” (Shakespeare, 1623/1884, Act 1, scene 5, lines 48–52). Comparable symbolism is used in the Bible as well. For example, Job curses the day when he was born and condemns it to darkness. The prayer of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad—“Lead me from darkness to light!” (1.3.28)— reiterates a similar notion. Empirical findings attest to such metaphorical associations. For example, professional sports players wearing black are perceived as more malevolent than players wearing nonblack clothes (Frank & Gilovich, 1988). Research on embodied cognition suggests that such metaphors are useful not only for understanding and communicating abstract ideas, but also for forming a basis for concrete sensory experiences (Lakoff, & Johnson, 1980; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). For instance, Zhong and Leonardelli (2008) asked participants to recall a time when they felt socially rejected (an abstract concept) and then to indicate the temperature in the room (a concrete sensory experience). Compared with participants in a socially included group, participants in the socially rejected group perceived the room to be significantly colder. On the basis of these findings and theorizing, we explored whether recalling abstract concepts such as evil (as exemplified by unethical deeds) and goodness (as exemplified by ethical deeds) can indeed influence the sensory experience of the brightness of light. Specifically, we hypothesized that individuals who recall a time when they performed an ethical deed should perceive their immediate surroundings to be brighter than should individuals who recall a time when they performed an unethical deed. We tested our prediction in two studies. In addition, in Study 2, we tested a second prediction that follows from our first one: If people perceive less light after recalling an unethical behavior than after recalling an ethical behavior, participants who have recalled an unethical behavior should exhibit a greater preference for light-producing objects (but not for other objects) than should participants who have recalled an ethical behavior.

How Time Horizon Perceptions and Relationship Deficits Affect Impulsive Consumption

The authors examine how different types of relationship deficits (emotional vs. social) and time horizon perceptions (expanded vs. limited) affect consumers’ impulsive behaviors. Emotional deficits refer to a lack of intimate attachment, whereas social deficits refer to a lack of social connections. Some people view time as expanded, whereas others view it as limited. Essential relationship deficits are defined as a lack of social connections for people with an expanded time horizon and a lack of emotional attachments for people with a limited time horizon. Inessential relationship deficits, conversely, are a lack of emotional attachments for people with an expanded time horizon and a lack of social connections for people with a limited time horizon. The authors reveal that people who experience essential relationship deficits are more likely to engage in impulsive behaviors than those who experience inessential relationship deficits, because the experience of essential relationship deficits depletes them. The authors report the convergent results of impulsive behaviors, both in terms of engagement in unplanned behaviors and in terms of preference toward short-term gratification across self-reported intentions, as well as actual behaviors.

Selective Literature Review and Selective Data Analyses: Implications for the (Re)Analysis of Public Access Research Data

ABSTRACT This article addresses concerns raised by Pashler et al. (2016/this issue) about the effect size and data of Study 3 of Chatterjee et al. (2013). The analysis of the original data of Study 3, corrected for coding errors, shows that cash priming is associated with cost-related words (Cohen’s d = 0.49) and effect sizes of all three studies are within the range reported in the relevant literature. While this article underscores the importance of public access to research data to strengthen research enterprise, it alerts researchers that the use of selective literature and partial analysis can lead to misleading inferences.