M aking effective decisions under risk often requires making accurate predictions of other people's decisions under risk. We experimentally assess the accuracy of people's predictions of others' risky choices. In four studies, we find evidence of systematic inaccuracy: predictions of others' choices are too regressive. That is, people predict that others' choices will be closer to risk neutrality than those choices actually are. Where people are risk seeking, they predict that others will be risk seeking but substantially less so; likewise, where people are risk averse, they predict that others will be risk averse but substantially less so. Put differently, people predict that others' choices will reveal a more muted form of prospect theory's fourfold pattern of risk preferences than actually prevails. Two psychological concepts, the notion of risk-as-feelings and of an empathy gap, help account for regressive mispredictions. We explore several debiasing techniques suggested by these notions and also find that self-reported ratings of empathy moderate the magnitude of regressive mispredictions.

Donations to large numbers of victims are typically muted relative to donations to a single identified victim. This article shows that people can donate more to large numbers of victims if these victims are perceived as entitative-comprising a single, coherent unit. For example, donations to help children in need are higher when the children comprise a family than when they have no explicit group membership. The same effect is observed on donations for endangered animals that are depicted as moving in unison. Perceived entitativity results in more extreme judgments of victims. Victims with positive traits are therefore viewed more favorably when entitative, triggering greater feelings of concern and higher donations. Entitativity has the opposite effect for victims sharing negative traits.

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The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time than causally unrelated events. In two subsequent experiments, perceived causality was manipulated by providing expert information and by asking the participants themselves to imagine causal relationships between the to-be-judged events. Again, substantial and reliable effects of perceived causality were obtained. Our results suggest that people use strength of perceived causality as a cue to infer temporal distance.

P revious endowment effect experiments have examined circumstances in which people encounter a single unit of a good (e.g., one chocolate). We contrast single-unit treatments with multiple-unit treatments in which participants encounter several units of a good (e.g., five chocolates). We observe endowment effects of typical magnitude for singleton holdings but attenuated endowment effects for multiple-unit holdings. Moreover, endowment effects consistently arise for singletons even as the definition of a unit is altered. For instance, participants holding one piece of chocolate show an endowment effect of standard size, but so do participants holding one box of chocolates. Yet the box contains about 20 individual pieces of chocolate, and participants given that many separate pieces show a substantially attenuated endowment effect. We thus propose the property of "unit dependence": the definition of a unit can change, but contingent on any given definition, a pronounced endowment effect may emerge for singletons but not multiples.

Recent research has shown that when people perceive a causal relation between 2 events, they "compress" the intervening elapsed time. The present work shows that a naïve mechanical-physical conception of causality, in which causal forces are believed to dissipate over time, underlies the estimates of shorter elapsed time. Being primed with alternative, nondissipative causal mechanisms and having the cognitive capacity to consider such mechanisms moderates the compression effect. The studies rule out similarity, mnemonic association, and anchoring as alternative accounts for the effect. Taken together, the findings support the hypothesis that causal cognition plays a major role in judgments of elapsed time. The implications of the compression effect on the timing of future actions, persistence, and causal learning are discussed.

People sometimes feel the effect of product consumption almost instantaneously-within an unrealistically short time after consumption. Such placebo-like effects are typically attributed to conditioning, motivation, or expectations about product efficacy. The present research shows such effects can also occur because, under some conditions, people are more prone to underestimate the time to onset of products they have used in the past. These recollections of too short a time to onset alter people's experience of products and cause them to report more rapid effects. Participants who were led to believe there was a strong causal link between having consumed a product and improved performance on a task recalled that less time elapsed before they experienced an effect. In subsequent consumption, they felt comfortable using the product later in time, started working on a similar task earlier upon use, experienced the product's effect sooner, and were less inclined to switch to competing products. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

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