Emotions can influence charity donation decisions in ways that people and policy makers might prefer they did not. For example, our studies demonstrate that people who are exposed to a sequence of emotionally described humanitarian crises, donate more resources to crises that just happen to...

People exhibit an "illusion of courage" when predicting their own behavior in embarrassing situations. In three experiments, participants overestimated their own willingness to engage in embarrassing public performances in exchange for money when those performances were psychologically distant:...

Mental accounting posits that people track their expenditures using cognitive categories or “mental accounts.” The authors propose that this cognitive process can be complemented by an approach that examines how feelings about a sum of money, or the money's “affective tag,” influence its...

Humor is a common goal of marketing communications, yet humorous advertisements do not always improve consumer attitudes towards the advertised brand. By investigating a potential downside of attempting to be humorous, our inquiry helps explain why humorous ads can fail to improve, and...