Sam J Maglio

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Toronto

Many consumers say they want to save for the future yet struggle to do so. This research examines this saving behavior problem from a persuasive messaging standpoint. With the goal of helping people take better care of their future selves, we build on a stream of research that has found that the way people view their identities over time affects th...

After an interpersonal mishap—like blowing off plans with a friend, forgetting a spouse’s birthday, or falling behind on a group project—wrongdoers typically feel guilty for their misbehavior, and victims feel angry. These emotions are believed to possess reparative functions; their expression prevents future mistakes from reiterating. However, lit...

construal underlies mental travel. As a result, the human mind associates abstraction and psychological distance, whereby prompting abstract construal begets the inference of psychological distance - in time, social distance, hypotheticality, and physical space. That final distance is the only dimension that can be appraised visually, so would abst...

In attempting to draw bigger conclusions, researchers in psychology open their labs to more diverse groups of people. Yet even the most far-reaching theories must be tested with specific stimuli, materials, and methodology. To the extent that a study's stimuli are familiar beyond the lab to groups of people writ large, an experiment is said to have...

It is well documented that maximizers are less happy with their product-choices than are satisficers, but would this mean that maximizers use their products less? We conducted two studies and found that, contrary to scores of studies that demonstrate maximizers regret their decisions, maximizers consume their selected options with more gusto than s...

When consumers avoid taking algorithmic advice, it can prove costly to both marketers (whose algorithmic product offerings go unused) and to themselves (who fail to reap the benefits that algorithmic predictions often provide). In a departure from previous research focusing on when algorithm aversion proves more or less likely, we sought to identif...

What makes a past time period feel longer or shorter? We find evidence for a metamemory contrast effect in which the relationship between the number of events remembered from a time period and the number of events that one expects to remember from that period interact to determine felt duration. Specifically, days in the distant past can come to fe...

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, data regarding new infections were commonly presented and used to guide policy decisions (e.g., whether to close schools) and personal choices (e.g., whether to dine at a restaurant). In this manuscript, we highlight a critical aspect of pandemic data that can pose a challenge for people tryi...

People of all genders regularly pursue both personal and professional objectives. To the latter, research has documented substantial barriers for women, especially when they make mistakes. As articulated by role congruity theory, their stereotypically communal nature appears at odds with the agentic objectives frequently seen as inherent to the wor...

This research investigates the association between letter case and perception of gender. We propose that referents are judged as more feminine (vs. masculine) when their names are written with lowercase (vs. uppercase) letters. This effect emerges independent of differences in the size in which the letters appear and cannot be fully explained by di...

Current selves wield all the power in intertemporal tradeoffs. Although one set of future selves will make similar tradeoffs in the future, another self - who we term the cumulative future self - falls on the receiving end of those dictated decisions. How current selves commune with the cumulative future self determines whether the former heed plea...

Consumers’ lives are filled with scheduled events – both positive and negative. The current research examines how the valence of future scheduled events colors consumers’ temporal judgments in relation to such events: the time until their onset, the time during the events, and the time until their offset. We propose that the lay theory espousing “t...

Mental life is not confined to physical reality. Instead, anchored in the here and now, people can conjure worlds set in other locations, in other times, from other people's perspectives, and with otherworldly odds. These routes away from immediacy represent different dimensions of psychological distance—space, time, social distance, and probabilit...

Company apologies require apologizers, which can take the form of one person or multiple people. Does the number of apologizers influence how consumers interpret and respond to that apology? The current research suggests that a single apologizer proves more effective than multiple apologizers because consumers tend to have a stronger empathic respo...

Workers often work in groups of varying sizes, and those workers’ work is often judged by others. To examine how the two might relate, we first asked respondents to report the optimal number of collaborators for a variety of different tasks, finding substantial variability across tasks (Supplementary Study) that tracked with perceived task complexi...

Whether guided by feelings or deliberation, most decisions entail selecting an option and then living with it. Beyond simply investigating which option people select and how they evaluate it right away, the present research examines the extended issue of how people think and act in the service of that choice as a function of how they decided in the...

Companies often feature positive consumer reviews on their websites and in their promotional materials in an attempt to increase sales. However, little is known about which particular positive reviews companies should leverage to optimize sales. Across four lab studies involving both hypothetical and real choices as well as field data from a retail...

Wherever consumers envision faraway locations, remember the past, predict the future, consider the perspective of others, or entertain remote possibilities, their minds extrapolate beyond what lies in front of them to something psychologically distant. Conjuring and considering that which is psychologically distant thus lies at the heart of how mos...

Time-series data—measurements of a quantity over time—can be presented as stocks (the quantity at each point in time) or flows (the change in quantity from one point in time to the next). In a series of six experiments, we find that the choice of presenting data as stocks or flows can have a consequential impact on judgments. The same data can lead...

Through the process of prospection, people can mentally travel in time to summon in their mind's eye events that have yet to occur. Such depictions of the future often differ than those of the present, as do choices made for these 2 time periods. Conceptually and semantically, this research tradition presupposes a division between the 2: At some po...

English passages can be in either the active or passive voice. Relative to the active voice, the passive voice provides a sense of objectivity regarding the events being described. This leads to our hypothesis that passages in the passive voice can increase readers’ psychological distance from the content of the passage, triggering an abstract cons...

Coffee and tea are two beverages commonly-consumed around the world. Therefore, there is much research regarding their physiological effects. However, less is known about their psychological meanings. Derived from a predicted lay association between coffee and arousal, we posit that exposure to coffee-related cues should increase arousal, even in t...

Decisions need not always be deliberative. Instead, people confronting choices can recruit their gut feelings, processing information about choice options in accordance with how they feel about options rather than what they think about them. Reliance on feelings can change what people choose, but might this decision strategy also impact how people...

Time estimation regarding the occurrence of unknown future events can be done on both absolute (“How many days from now will it happen?”) and relative (“How far from now does it feel?”) units, yet investigations to date have examined each with little reference to the other. We consider both constructs simultaneously, documenting an instance in whic...

Communicators have at their disposal an ever‐increasing variety of modalities by which to transmit messages. Do the prominent norms attached to different communication modalities contain information in and of themselves? The present investigation considers this question through the lens of text messages and emails, hypothesized to confer different...

Happiness can be conceptualized as a positive affective state or as a goal whose pursuit ironically pulls the pursuer away from achieving it (Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, & Savino in Emotion, 11(4), 807-815, 2011). But how do people think about time during this latter, never-ending pursuit of happiness? The present investigation asks how seeking happine...

People use names to infer meaning about the objects to which those names refer. Objects whose names include vowels produced toward the front of the mouth (Siri), relative to those with vowels produced toward the back of the mouth (Google), are expected to have certain physical features (e.g., smallness, sharpness, and quickness). Do these expectati...

We investigated a type of mere similarity that describes owning the same item as someone else. Moreover, we examined this mere similarity in a gift-giving context, whereby givers gift something that they also buy for themselves (a behavior we call "companionizing"). Using a Heiderian account of balancing unit-sentiment relations, we tested whether...

Every event that can occupy a span of time can also warp how long that duration feels. No shortage of factors configures such duration estimates, yet they remain largely confined to events experienced in the present moment. Might future events similarly impact duration? The present investigation leverages a phenomenological , which documents subjec...

Forecasted probabilities rarely stay the same for long. Instead, they are subject to constant revision—moving upward or downward, uncertain events become more or less likely. Yet little is known about how people interpret probability estimates beyond static snapshots, like a 30% chance of rain. Here, we consider the cognitive, affective, and behavi...

People mentally traverse psychological distance whenever they contemplate the past or the future, other places, other people, or unlikely events. As a result, these four routes away from one’s immediate experience share important commonalities. After summarizing research on how and why people traverse distance, we next incorporate issues related to...

Being objectively close to or far from a place changes how people perceive the location of that place in a subjective, psychological sense. In the six studies reported here, we investigated whether people's spatial orientation (defined as moving toward or away from a place) will produce similar effects-by specifically influencing psychological clos...

By planning the what, where, and when of pursuing a goal, people improve the likelihood that they will ultimately attain that goal. Whereas research to date has explored the breadth of this planning effect and its underlying processes, contextual variables that influence the formation and execution of plans have mostly gone unexplored. In light of...

A long tradition in sound symbolism describes a host of sound-meaning linkages, or associations between individual speech sounds and concepts or object properties. Might sound symbolism extend beyond sound-meaning relationships to linkages between sounds and modes of thinking? Integrating sound symbolism with construal level theory, we investigate...

People’s thoughts often go beyond what is right in front of them. In so doing, they mentally traverse psychological distance: They think about the past or the future, other places, other people, and wonder about the impossible. These four dimensions all tap into the same common construct of distancing from immediate experience. As a result, people...

Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differ...

What is the difference between far and further? Investigations into such psychological distancing-removal from an egocentric reference point-have suggested similarities between geographical space, time, probability, and social distance. We draw on these similarities to propose that experiencing any kind of distance will reduce sensitivity to any ot...

Can the mind be divorced from the body? As evidenced by a host of findings in the traditions of grounded cognition and embodiment, sensorimotor experience can exert a powerful influence on what and how people think. The current investigation explores the conditions that temper or enable this influence, proposing that level of mental construal may m...

Self-regulation by mentally contrasting a positive future with negative reality leads people to differentiate in their goal commitments: They commit to goals when expectations of success are high and let go when expectations of success are low. On the contrary, when indulging in the positive future or dwelling on negative reality, people fail to co...

Deliberative decision strategies have historically been considered the surest path to sound decisions; however, recent evidence and theory suggest that affective strategies may be equally as effective. In four experiments we examined conditions under which affective versus deliberative decision strategies might result in higher decision quality. Wh...

Scale can vary by requiring a different number of units to measure the same target. But what are the consequences of using fewer, larger units? We draw on past psychophysical research that shows how using fewer units reduces clutter in measurement, translating to shorter length estimates. Additionally, we propose that larger scale is associated wit...

Reports an error in "Following your heart or your head: Focusing on emotions versus information differentially influences the decisions of younger and older adults" by Joseph A. Mikels, Corinna E. Löckenhoff, Sam J. Maglio, Laura L. Carstensen, Mary K. Goldstein and Alan Garber (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2010[Mar], Vol 16[1], 87-...

Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differ...

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is widely used in studies of emotion and has been characterized primarily along the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Even though research has shown that the IAPS is useful in the study of discrete emotions, the categorical structure of the IAPS has not been characterized thoroughly. Th...