Changing defaults—the preselection that becomes effective without active choice—is becoming a prominent policy tool, after having been proven to be effective in areas as varied as retirement savings, organ donation and product customization. Yet, little is known about how default effects spill over to subsequent similar behaviors. In an online shopping scenario, we found standard default effects on the share of organically produced products in the overall selection of products. These effects did not spill over to subsequent active shopping choices. This was true for defaults that were hard and easy to change (Exp. 1, N = 90), for immediate and delayed subsequent choices (Exp. 2, N = 106) and for self‐selected defaults (Exp. 3, N = 181). These findings suggest that the reach and scalability of default manipulations in policy making may be limited, but also speak against the possibility for negative spillover.

Previous research with the ratio-bias task found larger response latencies for conflict trials where the heuristic-and analytic-based responses are assumed to be in opposition (e.g., choosing between 1/10 and 9/100 ratios of success) when compared to no-conflict trials where both processes converge on the same response (e.g., choosing between 1/10 and 11/100). This pattern is consistent with parallel dualprocess models, which assume that there is effective, rather than lax, monitoring of the output of heuristic processing. It is, however, unclear why conflict resolution sometimes fails. Ratio-biased choices may increase because of a decline in analytical reasoning (leaving heuristic-based responses unopposed) or to a rise in heuristic processing (making it more difficult for analytic processes to override the heuristic preferences). Using the process-dissociation procedure, we found that instructions to respond logically and response speed affected analytic (controlled) processing (C), leaving heuristic processing (H) unchanged, whereas the intuitive preference for large nominators (as assessed by responses to equal ratio trials) affected H but not C. These findings create new challenges to the debate between dual-process and singleprocess accounts, which are discussed.

In evaluative priming, positive or negative primes facilitate reactions to targets that share the same valence. While this effect is commonly explained as reflecting invariant structures in semantic long-term memory or in the sensorimotor system, the present research highlights the role of integrativity in evaluative priming. Integrativity refers to the ease of integrating two concepts into a new meaningful compound representation. In extended material tests using paired comparisons from two pools of positive and negative words, we show that evaluative congruity is highly correlated with integrativity. Therefore, in most priming studies, congruity and integrativity are strongly confounded. When both aspects are disentangled by manipulating congruity and integrativity orthogonally, three priming experiments show that evaluative-priming effects were confined to integrative prime-target pairs. No facilitation of prime-congruent targets was obtained for non-integrative stimuli. These findings are discussed from a broader perspective on priming conceived as flexible, context-dependent, and serving a generative adaptation function.

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Kim and Hommel (2015) provided an intriguing alternative explanation for conformity effects. Building on the theory of event coding (TEC;Hommel, 2009;Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001), they assumed that one's own and others' actions are represented in comparable ways, so that people may fail to distinguish between those two action categories. As a consequence, "people's actions that have no social meaning should induce conformity effects" (p. 484).Building on a paradigm previously used to investigate social conformity (Klucharev, Hytönen, Rijpkema, Smidts, & Fernández, 2009;Shestakova et al., 2013), Kim and Hommel tested their hypothesis in three experiments involving facial-beauty ratings. In a first block, participants rated the beauty of 220 faces on a scale from 1 to 8 using a computer keyboard. After each rating, participants were presented with an intervening event. Participants saw either a static slide showing a number between 1 and 8 or a short movie in which another person pressed the respective number key (1-8) on a computer keyboard. These numbers were equal to, 2 to 3 points lower than, or 2 to 3 points higher than the rating given by the participant (equal, lower, and higher conditions, respectively). In a second block, all faces were again rated on the same scale from 1 to 8. The hypothesis was that numbers lower than the initial rating should lead to a negativity shift, whereas numbers higher than the initial rating should lead to a positivity shift. The authors present support for this across all three experiments.Critically, the paradigm confounded extremity of initial ratings and assignment of experimental condition (equal vs. lower vs. higher). Since the rating scale was restricted from 1 to 8, experimental condition could not be assigned independently of initial ratings. For example, it was not possible to assign an initial rating of 7 719082P SSXXX10.