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The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

Associative and statistical theories of causal and predictive learning make opposite predictions for situations in which the most recent information contradicts the information provided by older trials (e.g., acquisition followed by extinction). Associative theories predict that people will rely on the most recent information to best adapt their behavior to the changing environment. Statistical theories predict that people will integrate what they have learned in the two phases. The results of this study showed one or the other effect as a function of response mode (trial by trial vs. global), type of question (contiguity, causality, or predictiveness), and postacquisition instructions. That is, participants are able to give either an integrative judgment, or a judgment that relies on recent information as a function of test demands. The authors concluded that any model must allow for flexible use of information once it has been acquired. Learning to predict the events in our environment is critical for survival. Both humans and other animals are known to learn predictive and causal relations between the events in their environment, and the question of how they do it has preoccupied philosophers and psychologists for many years.

This article, based on Chapters I and 2 of the first author's dissertation at Columbia University, was supported by the Institute for Marketing Studies at Columbia University and The Marketing Studies Center at UCLA, and by the National Science Foundation CAREER award SBR-95-10924 given to the second author. A special thanks to Ellie Fang. Bruce Lee, and Angel Coleman for coding the protocols, and to Stcye Pew erly. Barbara Sanburg. and Deb Heisley for the use of their classes. The authors are grateful for the comnents from Vijay Mahajan, Russ Winer, and four anonymous JMR reviewers. They also thank Lee Cooper. Mike Hanssens. Morris Holbrook, Gita Jobar, Frank Kardes, Dave Kramz, Don Lehmann, Michel Pham, Bernd Schmitt, Christos Sklavemis, and Takashi Yamauchi for their helpful comments

Participants recalled either a negative academic or interpersonal experience, and the relations among counterfactual thinking, negative emotions, and attributions of blame and control were examined. Situational context effects on attribution, counterfactual thinking, and emotion were observed, indicating a greater tendency toward self-focused cognition and emotion in the academic context than in the interpersonal context. Consistent with recent theorising, upward counterfactual thinking was associated with negative emotions of guilt, shame, regret, disappointment, and sadness. However, there was no indication that downward counterfactual thinking regulated emotion as previous literature suggests. Implications for functional and process theories of counterfactual thinking are discussed.

A meta-analysis of the available judgment and memory data on the sleeper effect in persuasion is presented. According to this effect, when people receive a communication associated with a discounting cue, such as a noncredible source, they are less persuaded immediately after exposure than they are later in time. Findings from this meta-analysis indicate that recipients of discounting cues were more persuaded over time when the message arguments and the cue had a strong initial impact. In addition, the increase in persuasion was stronger when recipients of discounting cues had higher ability or motivation to think about the message and received the discounting cue after the message. These results are discussed in light of classic and contemporary models of attitudes and persuasion. Persuasive messages are often accompanied by information that induces suspicions of invalidity. For instance, recipients of communications about a political candidate may discount a message coming from a representative of the opponent party because they do not perceive the source of the message as credible (e.g., Lariscy & Tinkham, 1999). Because the source of the political message serves as a discounting cue and temporarily decreases the impact

In this paper we take stock of recent research on how people summarize and evaluate extended experiences. Summary assessments do not simply integrate all the components of the evaluated events, but tend to focus on only a few features (gestalt characteristics). Examples of these defining features include the rate at which the transient state components of the experience become more or less pleasant over its duration, and the intensity of the state at key instances, in particular the most intense (peak) and the final (end) moments. It is not yet sufficiently clear which specific gestalt characteristics dominate summary assessments of experiences, nor how this differs across types of experiences or measurement approaches. To address some of these issues, we describe new research in this area, discuss potential methodological difficulties, and suggest directions for future research.

y be factored into the decision more heavily than is price. The execu- tive may choose to ride dow-ntown by taxi and then implement this decision by standing on line and taking a taxi to the hotel. To bring these sorts of decision situations into the laboratory, researchers commonly focused on the goal of obtaining money, which they assume is shared across people. In the prototypical task, subjects are given choice options that differ in probability and amount. The use of gambles enabled researchers to explore decision making under risk. Often, a number of different choices are made in a single experimental session, and the pattern of choices across sets is analyzed. For ample, people might be asked whether they prefer a 45% chance to win $200 or a 50% chance to win $150. Later in the same ses sion, they might be asked whether they prefer a 90% chance to win $200 or a 100% chance to win $150. At issue in studies like these is the consistency of people's choices. The anal- yses would in

This article considers the role of linguistic context in social memory and social judgment. Two experiments compared perceivers ’ responses to person descriptions formulated at a high level of linguistic abstraction (adjectives/traits) versus a low level of linguistic abstraction (action verbs/behaviors). Based on the linguistic category model, together with prior empirical findings in psychology and linguistics, traits as compared with behavioral descriptions of a social target were hypothesized to elicit lower attention, poorer recall, and more expectancy-consistent impressions. Support for these hypotheses was obtained for a social target consisting of an individual as well as a nonentitative group. These results suggest a moderating role of linguistic context in inconsistency processing. Whereas concrete (behavioral) person descriptions elicited relatively deep, systematic processing, abstract (trait) person descriptions elicited more cursory, heuristic processing guided by the perceiver’s expectancies regarding the target person. It is concluded

s huge. Our purpose in providing this document, a revised version of a portion of a grant proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation in 1996, is two-fold. One is that it provides a (necessarily selective and incomplete) documentation of some of the impressive advances in the study of elections, public opinion, and related areas that have been based on NES data. Given the central role these data have played in these fields, this document should constitute a helpful review of a crucial part of the relevant literatures. Second, this document should also help stimulate ideas about further research that might tap some of the vast unused potential of these 2 individual studies, as well as the "greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts" potential of the extensive time series. In the end, the value of the project depends on the ideas and work not just of those who design the study, but those whose inspiration leads to research based on the data. All who venture within are