Things change. Things also get changed—often. Why? The obvious reason is that revising things often makes them better. We document a less obvious reason: revising things makes people think they are better, even absent objective improvement. Eleven studies document the preference for revision and provide insight into its psychological underpinnings. Studies 1A-1C document the effect among MBA students engaged in a resume revision process, while Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate the effect both experientially (eating candy) and via choice (of pens). Revisions are preferred even when trivially different from their predecessors (study 4A), and even when there is no difference between original and revised versions (study 4B). People overgeneralize their belief that revisers intend to improve their creations, and that revisions represent the successful fruition of those intentions (studies 5A and 5B); as a result, people are relatively uncritical of flaws in purportedly revised products (a video game; study 6), unless cued to doubt that revisers can be trusted (study 7).
#1Ed O'Brien(U of C: University of Chicago)H-Index: 15
What would it be like to revisit a museum, restaurant, or city you just visited? To rewatch a movie you just watched? To replay a game you just played? People often have opportunities to repeat hedonic activities. Seven studies (total N = 3,356) suggest that such opportunities may be undervalued: Many repeat experiences are not as dull as they appear. Studies 1–3 documented the basic effect. All participants first completed a real-world activity once in full (Study 1, museum exhibit; Study 2, mo...
Moderation hypotheses appear in every area of psychological science, but the methods for testing and probing moderation in two-instance repeated measures designs are incomplete. This article begins with a short overview of testing and probing interactions in between-participant designs. Next I review the methods outlined in Judd, McClelland, and Smith (Psychological Methods 1; 366–378, 1996) and Judd, Kenny, and McClelland (Psychological Methods 6; 115–134, 2001) for estimating and conducting in...
#1Ed O'Brien(U of C: University of Chicago)H-Index: 15
#2Michael Kardas(U of C: University of Chicago)H-Index: 4
The concept of change simply entails the totality of ways in which a particular entity has grown better and grown worse. Five studies suggest that this is not how people actually understand it for themselves. Rather, when asked to assess how they have “changed” over time, people bring to mind only how they have improved and neglect other trajectories (e.g., decline) that they have also experienced; global change is specifically translated as directional change for the better. This tendency emerg...
Consumers demonstrate a robust preference for items with earlier serial numbers (e.g., No. 3/100) over otherwise identical items with later serial numbers (e.g., No. 97/100) in a limited edition set. This preference arises from the perception that items with earlier serial numbers are temporally closer to the origin (e.g., the designer or artist who produced it). In turn, beliefs in contagion (the notion that objects may acquire a special essence from their past) lead consumers to view these ite...
Although documenting everyday activities may seem trivial, four studies reveal that creating records of the present generates unexpected benefits by allowing future rediscoveries. In Study 1, we used a time-capsule paradigm to show that individuals underestimate the extent to which rediscovering experiences from the past will be curiosity provoking and interesting in the future. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that people are particularly likely to underestimate the pleasure of rediscovering ordina...
Marketers often extend product lines by offering limited-capability models that are created by removing or degrading features in existing models. This production method, called versioning, has been lauded because of its ability to increase both consumer and firm welfare. According to rational utility models, consumers weigh benefits relative to their costs in evaluating a product. So the production method should not be relevant. Anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. Six studies show how the pro...
We experience the world serially rather than simultaneously. A century of research on human and nonhuman animals has suggested that the first experience in a series of two or more is cognitively privileged. We report three experiments designed to test the effect of first position on implicit preference and choice using targets that range from individual humans and social groups to consumer goods. Experiment 1 demonstrated an implicit preference to buy goods from the first salesperson encountered...
Aubiquitous feature of even the fastest self-service technology transactions is the wait. Conventional wisdom and operations theory suggest that the longer people wait, the less satisfied they become; we demonstrate that because of what we term the labor illusion, when websites engage in operational transparency by signaling that they are exerting effort, people can actually prefer websites with longer waits to those that return instantaneous results---even when those results are identical. In f...
Self-predictions are highly sensitive to current intentions but often largely insensitive to factors influencing the readiness with which those intentions are translated into future behavior. When such factors are under a person’s control, they could be used to increase the probability that desired future behavior will be undertaken, but they will be underused if self-predictions underestimate their impact. This hypothesis was borne out in two experiments involving working students attempting to...
The longer something is thought to exist, the better it is evaluated. In Study 1, participants preferred an existing university requirement over an alternative; this pattern was more pronounced when the existing requirement was said to be in place for a longer period of time. In Study 2, participants rated acupuncture more favorably as a function of how old the practice was described. Aesthetic judgments of art (Study 3) and nature (Study 4) were also positively affected by time in existence, as...