The choice overload hypothesis states that an increase in the number of options to choose from may lead to adverse consequences such as a decrease in the motivation to choose or the satisfaction with the finally chosen option. A number of studies found strong instances of choice overload in the lab and in the field, but others found no such effects or found that more choices may instead facilitate choice and increase satisfaction. In a meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments (N p 5,036), we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies. While further analyses indicated several potentially important preconditions for choice overload, no sufficient conditions could be identified. However, some idiosyncratic moderators proposed in single studies may still explain when and why choice overload reliably occurs; we review these studies and identify possible directions for future research.

Although people have been shown to rely on feelings to make judgments, the conditions that moderate this reliance have not been systematically reviewed and conceptually integrated. This article addresses this gap by jointly reviewing moderators of the reliance on both subtle affective feelings and cognitive feelings of ease-of-retrieval. The review revealed that moderators of the reliance on affective and cognitive feelings are remarkably similar and can be grouped into five major categories: (a) the salience of the feelings, (b) the representativeness of the feelings for the target, (c) the relevance of the feelings to the judgment, (d) the evaluative malleability of the judgment, and (e) the level of processing intensity. Based on the reviewed evidence, it is concluded that the use of feelings as information is a frequent event and a generally sensible judgmental strategy rather than a constant source of error. Avenues for future research are discussed.

The capacity to identify cheaters is essential for maintaining balanced social relationships, yet humans have been shown to be generally poor deception detectors. In fact, a plethora of empirical findings holds that individuals are only slightly better than chance when discerning lies from truths. Here, we report 5 experiments showing that judges' ability to detect deception greatly increases after periods of unconscious processing. Specifically, judges who were kept from consciously deliberating outperformed judges who were encouraged to do so or who made a decision immediately; moreover, unconscious thinkers' detection accuracy was significantly above chance level. The reported experiments further show that this improvement comes about because unconscious thinking processes allow for integrating the particularly rich information basis necessary for accurate lie detection. These findings suggest that the human mind is not unfit to distinguish between truth and deception but that this ability resides in previously overlooked processes.

Core theories in economics, psychology, and marketing suggest that decision makers benefit from having more choice. In contrast, according to the too-much-choice effect, having too many options to choose from may ultimately decrease the motivation to choose and the satisfaction with the chosen option. To reconcile these two positions, we tested whether there are specific conditions in which the too-much-choice effect is more or less likely to occur. In three studies with a total of 598 participants, we systematically investigated the moderating impact of choice set sizes, option attractiveness, and whether participants had to justify their choices. We also tested the moderating role of search behavior, domain-specific expertise, and participants' tendency to maximize, in a within-subject design. Overall, only choice justification proved to be an effective moderator, calling the extent of the too-much-choice effect into question. We provide a theoretical account for our findings and discuss possible pathways for future research.

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Being excluded and ignored has been shown to threaten fundamental human needs and cause pain. Such reflexive reactions to social exclusion have been conceptualized as direct and unmoderated (temporal need threat model of ostracism). Here, we propose an extension and argue that reflexive reactions depend on how social exclusion situations are construed. If being excluded is understood as a violation of an inclusion norm, individuals will react with pain and threat. In contrast, if being excluded is consistent with the prevailing norm, the exclusion situation is interpreted as less threatening, and negative reflexive reactions to ostracism should be attenuated. Four studies empirically support this conceptual model. Studies 3 and 4 further show that to guide situated construal, the norm has to be endorsed by the individual. In both Studies 1 and 3, the effect of the norm is mediated by the objective situation's subjective construal.

Ease-of-retrieval and processing capacity -2 -Abstract Three studies investigated the interplay between processing capacity and reliance on accessibility experiences versus reliance on accessible content. Participants low in processing capacity were more likely to rely on the experience of ease versus difficulty, whereas participants high in processing capacity were more likely to base their judgment on the accessible content information. This result was robust across two different judgmental domains and was further supported by the assessment of processing latencies during judgment formation as an indicator of the underlying processes. In combination, the reported findings suggest that reliance on ease-of-retrieval experiences is particularly likely in situations of low processing capacity.Keywords: Ease-of-retrieval, subjective experiences, processing capacity, heuristic Ease-of-retrieval and processing capacity -3 -Relying on accessible content versus accessibility experiences:The case of processing capacity It has long been suggested that judgments may be based on both accessible content (e.g., Higgins, 1996;Wyer & Srull, 1989) and subjective experiences that accompany information processing (e.g., contributions in Bless & Forgas, 2000). With respect to subjective experiences, the role of accessibility experiences has received particular attention. Starting with Tversky and Kahneman (1973), it has been suggested that the experience of the "ease with which instances or associations could be brought to mind" (p. 208) influences judgments and decisions across a wide range of domains (for an overview see Schwarz, 1998Schwarz, , 2004 Despite the highly prominent role of the ease-of-retrieval heuristic in judgment and decision making, and despite the seeming universality of the influence of the experienced ease-ofretrieval, only a handful of research endeavors investigated whether the use of these kinds of cognitive experiences is ubiquitous, or whether it is restricted to certain situational circumstances. The current research set out to further our understanding of this important question. Previous research on factors that moderate reliance on accessibility experiencesApart from a small set of investigations, we know little about factors that moderate the reliance on subjective experiences in judgment formation (for notable exceptions, see below). This scarcity is striking, considering both the theoretical (for a review, see Schwarz, 1998) and practical importance (e.g., Wänke et al., 1997;Raghubir & Menon, 1998;Dijksterhuis et al., 1999) of cognitive subjective experiences such as the ease-of-retrieval phenomenon. One obvious reason for this lack of evidence is the fact that both paths of judgment formation addressed here -accessible content versus accessibility experiencesEase-of-retrieval and processing capacity

Processing fluency, the experienced ease of ongoing mental operations, influences judgments such as frequency, monetary value, or truth. Most experiments keep to-be-judged stimuli ambiguous with regards to these judgment dimensions. In real life, however, people usually have declarative information about these stimuli beyond the experiential processing information. Here, we address how experiential fluency information may inform truth judgments in the presence of declarative advice information. Four experiments show that fluency influences judged truth even when advice about the statements' truth is continuously available and labeled as highly valid; the influence follows a linear cue integration pattern for two orthogonal cues (i.e., experiential and declarative information). These data underline the importance of processing fluency as an explanatory construct in real-life judgements and support a cue integration framework to understand fluency effects in judgment and decision making. Fluency_and_Advice 3 Experiential fluency and declarative advice jointly inform judgments of truthProcessing fluency is the experiential component of mental operations such as perceiving, storing, retrieving, or generating information (see Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2013). This fluency experience influences judgments and evaluations from basic dimensions such as stimuli's frequency (e.g.,