Although anti-terrorism policy should be based on a normative treatment of risk that incorporates likelihoods of attack, policy makers’ anti-terror decisions may be influenced by the blame they expect from failing to prevent attacks. We show that people’s anti-terror budget priorities before...

This confusion about the activities of scientists and clinicians is reflected in booksellers’ varying decisions to shelve (often on opposite ends of the bookstore) Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on happiness under ‘‘Science,’’ ‘‘Cognitive Science,’’ ‘‘Psychology and...

Although previous research has shown that helping others leads to higher happiness than helping oneself, people frequently predict that self-serving behavior will make them happier than prosocial behavior. Here, we explore whether abstract construal — thinking about an event from a higher...

In 5 studies, the authors examined people's perceptions of the endowment effect, or the tendency to value an object more once one owns it. In the 1st 2 studies, the authors documented egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers regarding the endowment effect: Both owners and buyers...

People tend to value objects more highly simply because they own them. Prior research indicates that people underestimate the impact of this endowment effect on both their own and other people's preferences. We show that underestimation of the endowment effect can lead to suboptimal behavior in...

People tend to value objects more simply because they own them. Prior research indicates that people underestimate the impact of this endowment effect on both their own and other people’s preferences.We show that underestimating the endowment effect and hence owners’ selling prices can lead...