Norbert Schwarz

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Psychology

Most theories treat attitudes as enduring evaluative tendencies; the dispositional focus enjoys intuitive appeal because it is compatible with observers’ preference for dispositional explanations (aka fundamental attribution error). From the actor’s perspective, evaluation stands in the service of action. Any adaptive system of evaluation needs to...

Feelings-as-information theory conceptualizes the role of subjective experiences – including moods, emotions, metacognitive experiences, and bodily sensations – in judgment. It assumes that people attend to their feelings as a source of information, with different feelings providing different types of information. Whereas feelings elicited by the t...

To evaluate whether a claim is likely to be true, people attend to whether it is compatible with other things they know, internally consistent and plausible, supported by evidence, accepted by others, and offered by a credible source. Each criterion can be evaluated by drawing on relevant details (an effortful analytic strategy) or by attending to...

Experimental work has revealed causal links between physical cleansing and various psychological variables. Empirically, how robust are they? Theoretically, how do they operate? Major prevailing accounts focus on morality or disgust, capturing a subset of cleansing effects, but cannot easily handle cleansing effects in non-moral, non-disgusting con...

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words that predominantly occur alongside positive (or negative) words in natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity when evaluated in isolation, suc...

This is a commentary on Ballantyne’s (in press) review of the intellectual humility literature in a special issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology. Ballentyne proposes to conceptualize intellectual humility in terms of procedures of evidence-based inquiry rather than in terms of mere openness to different points of view. I endorse that proposa...

Johnson, Bilovich, and Tuckett’s (Beh Brain Scie, in press) conviction narrative theory holds that reasoners adopt “a narrative that feels ‘right’ to explain the available data” and use “that narrative to imagine plausible futures” (p. 1). Drawing on feelings-as-information theory, this commentary reviews the role of metacognitive experiences of ea...

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly-neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words that predominantly occur alongside positive (negative) words in natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity when evaluated in isolation, such s...

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly-neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words that predominantly occur alongside positive (negative) words in natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity when evaluated in isolation, such s...

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs. male) names collocate with art- (vs. science-) related concepts, and African American (vs. White American) names collocate with negative (vs. positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such co...

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs male) names collocate with art- (vs science-) related concepts, and African American (vs White American) names collocate with negative (vs positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such colloc...

Objectives: Recent virtual court proceedings have seen a range of technological challenges, producing not only trial interruptions but also cognitive interruptions in processing evidence. Very little empirical research has focused on how the subjective experience of processing evidence affects evaluations of trial participants and trial decisions....

People do much of their thinking in a social context by drawing on information provided by others and sharing their own judgments with others. This exchange is guided by the tacit assumptions underlying the conduct of conversations in everyday life. This chapter reviews these assumptions and their implications for social cognition research. It high...

In everyday language, abstract concepts are described in terms of concrete physical experiences (e.g., good things are “up”; the past is “behind” us). Stimuli congruent with such conceptual metaphors are processed faster than stimuli that are not. Since ease of processing enhances aesthetic pleasure, stimuli should be perceived as more pleasing whe...

Bodily sensations impact metaphorically related judgments. Are such effects obligatory or do they follow the logic of knowledge accessibility? If the latter, the impact of sensory information should be moderated by the accessibility of the related metaphor at the time of sensory experience. We manipulated whether “importance” was on participants’ m...

Novel products present unknown opportunities as well as unknown risks. Past research suggested that lowpsychological control highlights risks and reduces the adoption of novel products. Consistent with a situatedcognition perspective, we show that this depends on the specifics of low control. Across five studies, noveltyseeking was lower after cons...

We thank Ropovik and IJzerman for taking the time to write their blog post that follows up on prior correspondence in BBS (Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Our reading of their blog post is that there are two key aspects of disagreement. First, when implementing a p-curve analysis, we consider it crucial to follow all best practices, not just some o...

Our commentators explore the operation of grounded procedures across all levels of analysis in the behavioral sciences, from mental to social, developmental, and evolutionary/functional. Building on them, we offer two integrative principles for systematic effects of grounded procedures to occur. We discuss theoretical topics at each level of analys...

Thinking is accompanied by metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty. People draw on these experiences as a source of information that can complement or challenge the implications of declarative information. We conceptualize the operation of metacognitive experiences within the framework of feelings-as-information theory and review their impl...

Information is judged as more true when it has been seen or heard repeatedly than when it is new. This illusory truth effect has important consequences in the real world, where we are repeatedly exposed to information of unknown veracity. While false information in natural contexts rarely comes with a warning label, false information in truth effec...

THIS PAPER HAS BEEN RETRACTED AT THE AUTHORS' REQUEST. THE RETRACTION NOTICE: "A user of the open science data sets accompanying the article noticed confounds between culture condition or treatment condition and sex of participants in studies 3, 4, and 5. What caused these confounds could not be fully reconstructed. The first and second authors, w...

This open-access book examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Thanks to funding from the Swiss National Science Foundat...

Bodily sensations impact metaphorically related judgments. Are such effects obligatory or do they follow the logic of knowledge accessibility? If the latter, the impact of sensory information should be moderated by the accessibility of the related metaphor at the time of sensory experience. We manipulated whether “importance” was on participants’ m...

This is a commentary on Calder, Brendl, Tybout, and Sternthal’s (2021) discussion of constructs and variables as part of a Methods Dialogue in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. I suggest that the verification approach’s focus on variables fosters a plethora of disconnected “effects” and a dearth of integrative theorizing in consumer behavior rese...

The Prototypical Majority Effect (PME) refers to the observation that people endorse majority opinions faster and with greater confidence than minority opinions. Although the PME has been assumed to stem from social influence, recent studies showed that it can arise from internal processes underlying decision and confidence alone. We used a conform...

Claims are more likely to be judged true when presented with a related nonprobative photo (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). According to a processing fluency account, related photos facilitate processing and easy processing fosters acceptance of the claim. Alternatively, according to an illusion-of-evidence account, related phot...

People are more likely to accept a claim as true, the more often they heard it in the past. We test whether using frequently encountered formal characteristics in constructing a novel claim increases its acceptance as true. A corpus analysis (study 1) established that, in everyday language use, lower-bound modifiers (e.g., “more than”) collocate mo...

People care about their privacy, but when they are online, they do not act as if they do. We apply the psychology of meaning‐making to shed light on why that is. Acquisti, Loewenstein, and Brandimarte’s (2021) review of factors relevant to gaps between privacy attitudes and behaviors highlights both the importance of the problem of online privacy a...

The current article tests the metacognitive proposition that the relative ease or difficulty with which narrative messages are processed can affect subsequent judgment. Challenging the assertion that experienced disfluency is mostly negative and undesirable, it is argued that disfluent (difficult-to-process) narratives are well-positioned to facili...

People’s assessment of risks is swayed by their current feelings. COVID-19 invokes powerful feelings because it is (i) a salient, enormous threat, (ii) unfamiliar, and (iii) intertwined with xenophobia. These three factors are known to exert predictable influence on people’s risk overgeneralization, policy preference, and sociopolitical attitudes....

Drawing on research on subjective confidence, we examined how the confidence and speed in responding to personality items track the consistency and variability in the response to the same items over repeated administrations. Participants (N = 57) responded to 132 personality items with a true/false response format. The items were presented five tim...

Despite their prevalence in the marketplace, little empirical attention has been paid to how employee uniforms affect consumer reactions to service experiences. We propose that employee uniforms facilitate the shared categorization of employees and their organization in the mind of the customer, which affects many of the inferences that customers d...

In language, people often refer to decision difficulty in terms of spatial distance. Specifically, decision-difficulty is expressed as proximity, for instance when people say that a decision was “too close to call”. Although these expressions are metaphorical, we argue, in line with research on conceptual metaphor theory, that they reflect how peop...

Researchers can characterize people’s well-being by asking them to provide global evaluations of large parts of their life at one time or by obtaining repeated assessments during their daily lives. Global evaluations are reconstructions that are influenced by peak, recent, and frequently occurring states, whereas daily reports reflect naturally occ...

Nostalgia is a mixed emotion. Recent empirical research, however, has highlighted positive effects of nostalgia, suggesting it is a predominantly positive emotion. When measured as an individual difference, nostalgia-prone individuals report greater meaning in life and approach temperament. When manipulated in an experimental paradigm, nostalgia in...

Ease of processing-cognitive fluency-is a central input in assessments of truth, but little is known about individual differences in susceptibility to fluency-based biases in truth assessment. Focusing on two paradigms-truthiness and the illusory truth effect-we consider the role of Need for Cognition (NFC), an individual difference variable captur...

To evaluate whether something is likely to be true, people attend to whether it is compatible with other things they know, internally consistent and plausible, supported by evidence, accepted by others, and offered by a credible source. Each criterion can be evaluated by drawing on relevant details (an effortful analytic strategy) or by attending t...

We normed one hundred trivia claims, each with a true and false version, by proportion of people who judged them to be true. Twenty claims were chosen for each of the following five categories: Science, geography, sports, animals, and food. This paper outlines the method of claim creation and includes all claims and truth rating data. Data was coll...

Bellicose metaphors for cancer are ubiquitous. But are they good metaphors for health communicators to use? Because metaphors can guide reasoning about abstract concepts, framing cancer with metaphors of battle, war, and enemies leads people to apply attributes of these concepts to cancer. The current research investigates how this affects inferenc...

Numerical values—from test scores to credit scores—inform us of our relative standing and can shape our decisions. The values are usually presented in a continuous format (which places scores on a single line) or a grouped format (which separates scores into several score groups). We investigate whether and how the presentation format affects one's...

In all languages studied, suspicion is metaphorically associated with the sense of smell. The relevant smell is a smell of rotting organic matter that one may eat. In some languages, one specific smell dominates the metaphors; in English, that smell is fishy. The smell-suspicion link is presumably adaptive – if something you may eat doesn’t smell r...

This chapter provides a theoretical background on probabilistic reasoning and discusses the state‐of‐the‐art application of subjective probability questions in surveys around the world. It describes measurement mechanisms for subjective probability questions with a special focus on the influence of cultural orientations pertinent to response patter...

Thought about abstract concepts is grounded in more concrete physical experiences. Applying this grounded cognition perspective to Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) folk-economic beliefs, we highlight its implications for the activation, application, cultural acceptance, and context sensitivity of folk-economic beliefs.

Conservatives report greater life satisfaction than liberals, but this relationship is relatively weak. To date, the evidence is limited to a narrow set of well-being measures that ask participants for a single assessment of their life in general. We address this shortcoming by examining the relationship between political orientation and well-being...

Increasingly, scientific communications are recorded and made available online. While researchers carefully draft the words they use, the quality of the recording is at the mercy of technical staff. Does it make a difference? We presented identical conference talks (Experiment 1) and radio interviews from NPR’s Science Friday (Experiment 2) in high...

Envy is a negative state arising when we encounter others with more desirable circumstances than our own. Its converse is pity, a negative state elicited by downward comparisons towards worse-off others. Both classes of emotions first require us to infer what a person's life as a whole must be like. However, the “focusing illusion” suggests these i...

Majority views are reported with greater confidence and fluency than minority views, with the difference increasing with majority size. This Prototypical Majority Effect (PME) was attributed generally to conformity pressure, but Koriat et al. showed that it can arise from the processes underlying decision and confidence independent of social influe...

Reviews research on embodied cognition and explores its implications for the conceptualization of attitudes.

Can the mere name of a seller determine his trustworthiness in the eye of the consumer? In 10 studies (total N = 608) we explored username complexity and trustworthiness of eBay seller profiles. Name complexity was manipulated through variations in username pronounceability and length. These dimensions had strong, independent effects on trustworthi...

With respect to the Distancing-Embracing model, we discuss whether experts with well-developed and highly accessible schemata that lend themselves to distancing have initial affective reactions similar to those of novices, who lack access to well-developed distancing mechanisms, and whether differences between experts' and novices' responses are ap...

Would we think more negatively of a person who caused rather than produced an outcome or who is described as utterly rather than totally unconventional? While these word choices may appear to be trivial, cause and utterly occur more frequently in a negative context in natural language use than produced or totally, even though these words do not hav...

This introduction to a special issue of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research reviews basic approaches to embodied cognition and sensory marketing and provides an overview of the contributions to the issue.

Insufficient attention to political ideology as an organizing axis reduces predictive power. Jost (2017) makes a significant contribution by outlining and documenting a set of relationships among personality factors, attitudes, values, and conservatism. The value of this approach is highlighting the possibility that ideology sticks when it fits fea...

People use lay theories to understand their worlds, including the body and diseases. Conceptual metaphors are similar to lay theories in their use of a simple domain to understand a more complex one. Unfortunately, some conceptual metaphors about the body prompt inferences about health and illness that ultimately have negative consequences. We expl...

Cognitions involved in a goal-directed activity may influence people’s behaviors in unrelated domains. We review evidence for such spillover effects and discuss the underlying processes in terms of behavioral mind-sets.

Product-related cues, such as brand or price, can influence consumers' taste perception. Going beyond this observation, we examine the extent to which a stimulus-extrinsic factor, such as the format of the measurement tool on which consumers describe attributes of a taste sample, influences concurrent taste perception, and in turn, later taste reco...

Mixed feelings come in many forms. We focus on mixed feelings resulting from conflicting evaluations of a single attitude object, that is, attitudinal ambivalence. Research on attitudinal ambivalence has led to specific measures that assess the presence, intensity, and resolution of ambivalence, shedding new light on underlying dynamics and moderat...

Reviews research into intuitions of truth and discusses its implications for fake news, social media, and the correction of misinformation. -- The published version (open access) is here: http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2017/08/gut-truth.aspx

Instructional manipulation checks (IMCs) are frequently included in unsupervised online surveys and experiments to assess whether participants pay close attention to the questions. However, IMCs are more than mere measures of attention -- they also change how participants approach subsequent tasks, increasing attention and systematic reasoning. We...

The accessibility of potentially relevant information is insufficient to predict its impact on judgment and behavior. Memory based judgments are consistent with the implications of what comes to mind when it does so easily, but not otherwise. The relative reliance on accessible content and subjective accessibility experiences varies with motivation...

A lot of information used in aging research relies on self-reports. Surveys or questionnaires are used to assess quality of life, attitudes toward aging, experiences of aging, subjective well-being, symptomatology, health behaviors, financial information, medication adherence, etc. Growing evidence suggests that older and younger respondents are di...

Research on group influence has yielded a prototypical majority effect (PME): Majority views are endorsed faster and with greater confidence than minority views, with the difference increasing with majority size. The PME was attributed to conformity pressure enhancing confidence in consensual views and causing inhibition in venturing deviant opinio...

Reviews research into the psychological effects of physical cleansing.

Three studies show that people draw metacognitive inferences about events from how well others remember the event. Given that memory fades over time, detailed accounts of distant events suggest that the event must have been particularly memorable, for example, because it was extreme. Accordingly, participants inferred that a physical assault (study...

Simonsohn (2015) proposed to use effect sizes of high powered replications to evaluate whether lower powered original studies could have obtained the reported effect. His focus on sample size misses that effect size comparisons are informative with regard to a theoretical question only when the replications (i) successfully realize the theoretical...

Some words tend to co-occur exclusively with a positive or negative context in natural language use even though such valence patterns are not dictated by definitions or are part of the words’ core meaning. These words contain semantic prosody, a subtle valenced meaning derived from co-occurrence in language. As language and thought are heavily inte...

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is a picture set used by researchers to select pictures that have been pre-rated on valence. Researchers rely on the ratings in the IAPS to accurately reflect the degree to which the pictures elicit affective responses. Here we show that this may not always be a safe assumption. More specifically, t...

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is a picture set used by researchers to select pictures that have been prerated on valence. Researchers rely on the ratings in the IAPS to accurately reflect the degree to which the pictures elicit affective responses. Here we show that this may not always be a safe assumption. More specifically, th...

Participant attentiveness is a concern for many researchers using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). While studies comparing the attentiveness of participants on MTurk vs traditional subject pool samples provided mixed support for this concern, attention check questions and other methods of ensuring participant attention have become prolific in MTur...

The current discussion of questionable research practices (QRPs) is meant to improve the quality of science. It is, however, important to conduct QRP studies with the same scrutiny as all research. We note problems with overestimates of QRP prevalence and the survey methods used in the frequently cited study by John, Loewenstein, and Prelec. In a s...

** Note: This post includes the text accepted for publication, which was subsequently highly copy-edited to fit the magazine format of the journal. ** Erroneous beliefs are difficult to correct. Worse, popular correction strategies may backfire and further increase the spread and acceptance of misinformation. People evaluate the truth of a stateme...

Emotion and rationality are fundamental elements of human life. They are abstract concepts, often difficult to define and grasp. Thus, throughout the history of western society, the head and the heart, concrete and identifiable elements,have been used as symbols of rationality and emotion. Drawing on the conceptual metaphor framework, we propose th...

Invited autobiographical essay in a "Pioneers" series of the journal.

"Passion for work" has become a widespread phrase in popular discourse. Two contradictory lay perspectives have emerged on how passion for work is attained, which we distill into the fit and develop implicit theories. Fit theorists believe that passion for work is achieved through finding the right fit with a line of work; develop theorists believe...

Ambivalence refers to a psychological conflict between opposing evaluations, often experienced as being torn between alternatives. This dynamic aspect of ambivalence is hard to capture with outcome-focused measures, such as response times or self-report. To gain more insight into ambivalence as it unfolds, the current work uses an embodied measure...

[This is a commentary on a target paper by Itamar Simonson in the same 2015 issue of the journal.] The behavioral decision theory (BDT) research of the last few decades addressed a big and imp ortant question, the limits of hu man rationality, but did so in an effect-fo cused way that many observers considered a serious limitation. Simonson’s (201...

Feelings of suspicion alert people not to take information at face value. In many languages, suspicion is metaphorically associated with smell; in English, this smell is “fishy”. We tested whether incidental exposure to fishy smells influences information processing. In Study 1, participants exposed to incidental fishy smells (vs. no odor) while an...

Previous research showed that a book seems more important when its physical heft is increased through concealed weights. Do such embodied metaphor effects reflect shallow reasoning in the absence of more diagnostic information? To address this issue, participants judged the importance of a heavy vs. light book in the presence vs. absence of substan...

Instructional manipulation checks (IMCs) have become popular tools for identifying inattentive participants in online studies. IMCs function by attempting to trick inattentive participants into responding incorrectly. However, from a conversational perspective, question characteristics are part of the researcher’s contribution to the conversation,...

Respondents answers to standardized questions presented in self-administered questionnaires or face-to-face and telephone interviews are a major source of social science data. These answers, however, are profoundly influenced by characteristics of the question asked, including the wording of the question, the format of the response alternatives, an...

The term attitude refers to a predisposition to evaluate some object in a favorable or unfavorable manner. This predisposition cannot be directly observed and is inferred from individuals' responses to the attitude object. Different measurement strategies draw on different types of responses. They include answers to direct questions; the observatio...