A meta-analysis assessed the behavioral impact of and psychological processes associated with presenting words connected to an action or a goal representation. The average and distribution of 352 effect sizes (analyzed using fixed-effects and random-effects models) was obtained from 133 studies (84 reports) in which word primes were incidentally presented to participants, with a non-opposite control group, prior to measuring a behavioral dependent variable. Findings revealed a small behavioral priming effect (dFE = 0.332, dRE = 0.352), which was robust across methodological procedures and only minimally biased by the publication of positive (vs. negative) results. Theory testing analyses indicated that more valued behavior or goal concepts (e.g., associated with important outcomes or values) were associated with stronger priming effects than were less valued behaviors. Furthermore, there was some evidence of persistence of goal effects over time. These results support the notion that goal activation contributes over and above perception-behavior in explaining priming effects. In sum, theorizing about the role of value and satisfaction in goal activation pointed to stronger effects of a behavior or goal concept on overt action. There was no evidence that expectancy (ease of achieving the goal) moderated priming effects.

A wealth of consumer research has proposed an experiential advantage: consumers yield greater happiness from purchasing experiences compared to material possessions. While this research stream has undoubtedly influenced consumer research, few have questioned its limitations, explored moderators, or investigated filedrawer effects. This has left marketing managers, consumers, and researchers questioning the relevance of the experiential advantage. To address these questions, the authors develop a model of consumer happiness and well-being based on psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, relatedness, self-esteem, and meaningfulness), and conduct an experiential advantage meta-analysis to test this model. Collecting 360 effect sizes from 141 studies, the meta-analysis supports the experiential advantage (d = 0.383, 95% CI [0.336, 0.430]), of which approximately a third of the effect may be attributable to publication bias. The analysis finds differential effects depending on the type of dependent measure, suggesting that the experiential advantage may be more tied to relatedness than to happiness and willingness-to-pay. The experiential advantage is reduced for negative experiences, for solitary experiences, for lower socioeconomic status consumers, and when experiences provide a similar level of utilitarian benefits relative to material goods. Finally, results suggest future studies in this literature should use larger sample sizes than current practice.

Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and it is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring temporal orientation through language expressed on social media. Judges rated the temporal orientation of 4,302 social media messages. We trained a classifier based on these ratings, which could accurately predict the temporal orientation of new messages in a separate validation set (accuracy/mean sensitivity = .72; mean specificity = .77). We used the classifier to automatically classify 1.3 million messages written by 5,372 participants (50% female; ages 13-48). Finally, we tested whether individual differences in past, present, and future orientation differentially related to gender, age, Big Five personality, satisfaction with life, and depressive symptoms. Temporal orientations exhibit several expected correlations with age, gender, and Big Five personality. More future-oriented people were older, more likely to be female, more conscientious, less impulsive, less depressed, and more satisfied with life; present orientation showed the opposite pattern. Language-based assessments can complement and extend existing measures of temporal orientation, providing an alternative approach and additional insights into language and personality relationships.

A wealth of literature suggests individuals use feelings in addition to facts as sources of information for judgment. This paper focuses on a manipulation in which participants list either a few or many examples of a given type, and then make a judgment. Instead of using the number of arguments or evidence strength, participants are hypothesized to use the of generating examples as the primary input to judgment. This result is commonly called the, and the feeling of ease is typically assumed to mediate the effect. We use meta-analytic methods across 142 papers, 263 studies, and 582 effect sizes to assess the robustness of the ease-of-retrieval effect, and whether or not the effect is mediated by subjective ease. On average, the standard few-versus-many manipulation exhibits a medium-sized effect. In experimental conditions designed to replicate the standard effect, about a third to half of the total effect is mediated by subjective ease. This supports the standard explanation, but suggests that other mediators are present. Further, we find evidence of publication bias that reduces the standard effect by up to 1 third. We also find that (a) moderator manipulations that differ from the standard manipulation lead to smaller, often reversed effects that are not as strongly mediated by ease, (b) several manipulations of theory-based moderators (e.g., polarized attitudes, misattribution) yield strong theory-consistent effects, (c) method-based moderators have little or no effects on the results, and (d) the mediation results are robust with respect to assumptions about error structure. (PsycINFO Database Record

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