How do consumers reconcile conflicting motives for social group identification and individual uniqueness? Four studies demonstrate that consumers simultaneously pursue assimilation and differentiation goals on different dimensions of a single choice: they assimilate to their group on one...

Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory — which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay — to examine how being humorous...

The results of six experiments indicate that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. People who described events emotionally rather than neutrally perceived those events as less psychologically distant, including embarrassing autobiographical events (Experiment 1), past and...

Psychological distance, or the extent to which something seems far away spatially, temporally, socially, or hypothetically, often influences humor perception. The benign violation theory of humor explains why psychological distance has a different effect on tragedies than minor mishaps. Distance...