The present research explores self-projection as a determinant of judgments of another person, but departs from past research by allowing research participants to gain individuating information about the other person in aconversational format. 72 college students first completed a checklist of bad study habits. Next, in pairs, they discussed their study habits while being video-taped. Participants then rated their own study habits and their conversation partner's study habits. Participants' ratings of their own study habits robustly predicted their ratings of their partners' study habits. The number of bad study habits the partner mentioned during the conversation had no significant effect on participants' ratings of their partner. By seeking common conversational ground, discussion partners appear to have created a perception of greater similarity between themselves and the other person than that which objectively existed.

Two studies explored the application of feature-matching and cancellation models to self-other comparisons. College participants completed a questionnaire about their religious behaviors and saw another questionnaire supposedly completed by another student. Participants in Study 1 (N = 114) who were explicitly provided direction of comparison instructions showed a direction of comparison effect, rating the person whose questionnaire they saw last as more religious. Participants in Study 2 (N = 103), who were not given explicit direction of comparison instructions, did not. Most important, in both studies, the extent to which self and other overlapped on shared features affected self- and other judgments asymmetrically. Participants appeared to cancel out behaviors shared by the self and other when rating the other person (i.e., they gave lower ratings when there was more overlap) but not when rating themselves.

Two studies of college students investigated the conditions under which women perform better than men on an empathic accuracy task (inferring the thoughts and feelings of a target person). The first study demonstrated that women's advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men's and women's performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

Two studies demonstrated that direction of comparison effects, a hallmark of feature matching models of comparison in preference and similarity judgments, were also found in typicality comparisons. College students compared the typicality of two group members (movie stars in Study 1, N = 82; fraternity members in Study 2, N = 153) who had been rated as equally typical in isolation. When group members shared typical features but had unique atypical features, participants rated the target of comparison (second group member) as more atypical than the referent (first group member). When group members shared atypical features, but had unique typical features, the pattern was reversed. Participants who were themselves members of the group provided similar ratings (Study 2). Consistent with past findings, the typicality judgments reflect a focus on the unique features of the target of comparison. Results are discussed in terms of judgments of members of stereotyped groups.

We examined how affective expectations and objective experience influenced female college students' (N= 69) evaluations of discussions of safe‐sex practices and willingness to engage in future discussions. Participants interacted with a confident male confederate (positive experience) or a nervous one (negative experience). Positive experiences produced more positive evaluations and greater willingness to participate in the future. Expectations were manipulated after the discussion by telling participants that discussions became easier over time (positive expectations) or telling participants nothing (neutral expectations). Independent of experience, positive expectations also resulted in more positive evaluations and greater willingness. Similar results were obtained 2 weeks later. Findings are discussed in terms of previous studies of affective expectations and implications for safe‐sex education programs.

Two studies examined the effects of asking college-aged participants to analyze their feelings regarding two options presented (student government candidates and college courses) that either shared positive features but had unique negative features, or shared negative features but had unique positive features. Past feature-matching studies have revealed a direction-of-comparison effect such that the valence of the unique (unmatched) features of the second option disproportionately influenced people's preferences. Asking participants in the present studies to list reasons about options before rating them reduced direction-of-comparison effects. Content analysis of the reasons indicated that analyzing reasons may have caused participants to use more of the features in their evaluations of the options and to consider unique features of both options, rather than disproportionately focusing on unique features of just the second option. The studies suggest a context in which analyzing reasons may improve judgments.

Two studies examined feature matching in successive judgments. College students in both studies read about 2 apartments with shared positive and unique negative features, and 1 less globally positive apartment with all unique features. In the feature-cancellation condition, participants first saw the shared-features apartments together and then saw the all-unique apartment. In the no-cancellation condition, participants first saw 1 shared-features apartment and the all-unique apartment together and then saw the other shared-features apartment. Shared-features apartments were rated higher when they were not seen together. The all-unique apartment was rated higher when it was seen last, when the first 2 apartments' shared features canceled out. Study 2 replicated Study 1 and also demonstrated that 2 additional variables failed to moderate the effect. Memory measures suggest that shared features are paired up as an organizational strategy.

Previous research has shown that analyzing reasons can change people's attitudes, but the exact mechanisms of this effect have not been entirely clear. It was hypothesized that introspecting about reasons focuses people's attention on thoughts that are accessible in memory and increases the extent to which people view their accessible thoughts as applicable to their current attitudes. In Study 1, college students formed initial impressions of a target person, and then positive or negative thoughts about the target person were made memorable. After a delay, half of the participants analyzed reasons for their attitude and half recalled the target person's behaviors. As predicted, people who analyzed reasons reported attitudes toward the target person that were based more on what they could recall about her. Study 2 showed that this effect occurs regardless of whether people initially form an online impression. Implications for the effects of analyzing reasons and for attitude formation are discussed.

Two studies explored the extent to which prior affective expectations shape people's evaluations of experiences and decisions about repeating those experiences. Study 1 found that students' prior expectations about an upcoming vacation accounted for a significant portion of the variance in their post-vacation evaluations, as did students' recall of specific experiences. In Study 2, both prior expectations and actual experiences of watching a movie were manipulated in a 2 × 2 design. People's affective expectations made more of a difference than the objective experience when assessing people's willingness to participate in the study again. A reinterpretation hypothesis—that people discount or reweigh memories of expectation-inconsistent events—accounted for the results of these studies better than a selective memory or initial effects hypothesis.

This study tested the prediction that introspecting about the reasons for one's preferences would reduce satisfaction with a consumer choice. Subjects evaluated two types of posters and then chose one to take home. Those instructed to think about their reasons chose a different type of poster than control subjects and, when contacted 3 weeks later, were less satisfied with their choice. When people think about reasons, they appear to focus on attributes of the stimulus that are easy to verbalize and seem like plausible reasons but may not be important causes of their initial evaluations. When these attributes imply a new evaluation of the stimulus, people change their attitudes and base their choices on these new attitudes. Over time, however, people's initial evaluation of the stimulus seems to return, and they come to regret choices based on the new attitudes.

This study examined the moderating effect of attitude accessibility on attitude change resulting from explaining the reasons for one's attitude. We assessed people's attitudes toward Ronald Reagan on two occasions, several weeks apart. Analyzing reasons at Time 2 resulted in attitude inconsistency across the two occasions for subjects with relatively inaccessible attitudes, but did not affect consistency for subjects with accessible attitudes. All subjects generated reasons that were somewhat inconsistent with their Time 1 attitudes, but only people with inaccessible attitudes based their Time 2 attitudes on these reasons. We argue that people with accessible attitudes are less likely to base their attitudes on temporarily salient thoughts about the attitude object.