What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and

How do anticipated short-term costs affect the likelihood of engaging in an activity that has long-term benefits. Five studies investigated the factors that determine (a) how anticipated short-term costs elicit self-control efforts and (b) how self-control efforts eventually diminish the influence of short-term costs on behavior. The studies manipulated short-term costs (e.g., painful medical procedures) and assessed a variety of self-control strategies (e.g., self-imposed penalties for failure to undergo a test). The results show that short-term costs elicit self-control strategies for self rather than others, before rather than after behavior, when long-term benefits are important rather than unimportant and when the costs are moderate rather than extremely small or large. The results also show that the self-control efforts help people act according to their long-term interests. People sometimes know what they prefer but feel uncertain that this is what they will actually do. This uncertainty often reflects feasibility constraints such as lack of opportunity, freedom of choice, or prerequisite skills. In some cases, however, people may know that what they prefer is entirely feasible but may nevertheless suspect that when faced with the actual choice they will be tempted to do something else. A considerable amount of basic and applied research on self-control has investigated how immediate temptations prevent people from acting according to their preferences and has suggested techniques that may help people resist the

The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act. Conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought about the action. The thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action, and not be accompanied by other causes. An experiment illustrating the role of priority found that people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that in fact they were forced to perform when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence. Conscious will is a pervasive human experience. We all have the sense that we do things, that we cause our acts, that we are agents. As William James (1890) observed, "the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life... depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago " (p. 453). And yet, the very notion of the will seems to contradict the core assumption of psychological science. After all, psychology examines how behavior is caused by mechanisms—the rattling off of genetic, unconscious, neural, cognitive, emotional, social, and yet other chains that lead, dully or not, to the things people do. If the things we do are caused by such mechanisms, how is it that we nonetheless experience willfully doing them? Our approach to this problem is to look for yet another chain—to examine the mechanisms that produce the experience of conscious will itself. In this article, we do this by exploring the possibility that the experience of will is a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally. Quite simply, it may be that people experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action. This idea means that people can experience conscious will quite independent of any actual causal connection between

this article. We are also grateful to Danny Chung, Billy Dilly, Monika Heller, Mareike Messner, and Joachim Vosgerau who served as experimenters. This research was supported by a German Science Foundation grant DFG: BR1722/1-2 given to C. Miguel Brendl; by a National Science Foundation grant SBR-9905013 given to Arthur B. Markman, and by a Transcoop award from the German American Academic Council to both the above authors. It is commonly assumed that an object capable of satisfying a need will be perceived as subjectively more valuable as the need for it intensifies. For example, the more active the need to eat, the more valuable food will become. This outcome could be called a valuation effect. In this article, we suggest a second basic influence of needs on evaluations: that activating a focal need (e.g., to eat) makes objects unrelated to that need (e.g., shampoo) less valuable, an outcome we refer to as the devaluation effect. Two existing studies support the existence of a devaluation effect using manipulations of the need to eat and to smoke, and measuring attractiveness of consumer products and willingness to purchase raffle tickets. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that consumers are not aware of the devaluation effect and its influence on their preferences. In research on decision making, one of the core theoretical constructs relating to preference is utility. Models based on utility assume that people's preferences for an object or its properties depend on the degree to which the object or property can satisfy some active goal. The utility of an object will vary as people s goals relating to that object change in intensity. Thus utility (as well as common sense) is consistent with a valuation relation between goals and choice whereby an object is valued ac...

The traditional way to define – and model – cognition, from the mid-fifties onward, has been to focus on deliberation, i.e., on those inferential processes that operate on well-defined symbolic mental representations in order to get a task accomplished that would require intelligence for human beings to solve. Consequently, AI programs, as well as computer models of psychological processes, were largely confined to a world of symbols. Only a few projects attempted to overcome these limitations and take a step towards more realistic interaction, such as Winograd’s famous SHRDLU (Winograd, 1972). Still, the seminal work accomplished in GPS (Newell & Simon, 1963) and STRIPS (Fikes & Nilsson, 1971) continues to be the anchor point for most of AI and cognitive science alike. Recent years, however, have brought a veritable paradigm shift: interaction with the ‘real’ environment – physical, or human users, or other ‘agents ’ – has been brought to the fore; and ‘situatedness ’ (Suchman, 1987) and the ability for communication and co-operation (as in distributed AI) have become important criteria. The basic nature of biological cognitive systems, including humans, has been recognised

www.ahrq.gov Contract No. 290-02-0017

of planning for intention-behavior consistency. Göteborg

ABSTRACT: Explicit processes of persuasion, resistance and acceptance are generally not incorporated in theories of new product diffusion. It is supposed that the deficiency of a dynamic cognitive foundation limits the use of diffusion models for scheduling advertising campaigns. An agent-based computational model is presented which encompasses the whole attitude formation and decision-making process. Product sellers, the mass media, and the consumers are connected in a social network. Running the simulation yields realistic communication about the product alternatives, and the belief exchange leaves episode traces in the consumer memories. A new memory model draws on the spreading activation metaphor and produces four separated responses to the communication episodes. These response types result from crossing the automatic-controlled and the holistic-analytic dimensions of information processing. KEY WORDS: Agent-based social simulation, diffusion theory, social networks, persuasion, habit breaking spreading activation memory model, automaticity, holistic processing

When making decisions, people group gains and losses. The way they choose to form these groupings, called "mental accounting", affects their decisions. Mental accounting is a powerful and intuitively compelling phenomenon. To this point, however, little attention has been devoted to the psychological principles that underlie mental accounting. In this article we explore the psychological processes that set up mental accounts and assign gains or losses to these accounts. We propose that (a) currently active goals set up mental accounts, and (b) gains and losses are weighted into these accounts proportionally to their representativeness to the goal that set up the account. We review existing evidence that supports this goalsrepresentativeness view of mental accounting and describe new studies designed to test these proposals. We also review other choice phenomena (e.g., sunk costs and entrapment) in which mental accounting is involved. We suggest that mental accounting is a useful selfregulatory strategy, despite the fact that it can sometimes lead to irrational choices.

No. 4. The hypothesis is proposed that the formation of an implementation intention or planning is causally related to behavioral intention and perceived behavioral control whereas, in accordance with the theory of planned behavior (I. Ajzen, 1985, 1991), behavioral intention is assumed to be causally related to attitude and perceived behavioral control. Indices of attitude towards the behavior, perceived behavioral control, behavioral intention, and planning intention were constructed from 192 undergraduates ´ ratings of descriptions of two fictitious situations in which the target behavior was varied with respect to benefit and actual behavioral control. Structural equation modeling based on the covariances between the measures yielded an acceptable fit of the proposed model including a causal path from attitude to perceived behavioral control. The results are consistent with and extend the findings in several recent studies showing that inducing an implementation intention increases the likelihood that a behavior is performed.