16. N. Schwarz and F. Strack, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications,” in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 61–84; D. Kahneman, “Objective Happiness,” in Well-Being, 3–25.
17. R. J. Larsen and B. L. Fredrickson, “Measurement Issues in Emotion Research,” in Well-Being, 40–60.
18. M. Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); W. G. Lycan, “Homuncular Functionalism Meets PDP,” in Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, ed. W. Ramsey, S. P. Stich, and D. E. Rumelhart (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991), 259–86.
19. O. Jowett, Plato: Protagoras, facsimile ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1956).
Chapter 4: In the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye
1. R. O. Boyer and H. M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: Cameron, 1955); P. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
2. E. Brayer, George Eastman: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
3. R. Karniol and M. Ross, “The Motivational Impact of Temporal Focus: Thinking About the Future and the Past,” Annual Review of Psychology 47: 593–620 (1996); and B. A. Mellers, “Choice and the Relative Pleasure of Consequences,” Psychological Bulletin 126: 910–24 (2000).
4. D. L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind and the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
5. E. F. Loftus, D. G. Miller, and H. J. Burns, “Semantic Integration of Verbal Information into Visual Memory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 4: 19–31 (1978).
6. E. F. Loftus, “When a Lie Becomes Memory’s Truth: Memory Distortion After Exposure to Misinformation,” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 1: 121–23 (1992). For an opposing view, see M. S. Zaragoza, M. McCloskey, and M. Jamis, “Misleading Postevent Information and Recall of the Original Event: Further Evidence Against the Memory Impairment Hypothesis,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 13: 36–44 (1987).
7. M. K. Johnson and S. J. Sherman, “Constructing and Reconstructing the Past and the Future in the Present,” in Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, ed. E. T. Higgins and R. M. Sorrentino, vol. 2 (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 482–526; and M. K. Johnson and C. L. Raye, “Reality Monitoring,” Psychological Review 88: 67–85 (1981).
8. J. Deese, “On the Predicted Occurrence of Particular Verbal Intrusions in Immediate Recall,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 58: 17–22 (1959).
9. H. L. Roediger and K. B. McDermott, “Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21: 803–14 (1995).
10. K. B. McDermott and H. L. Roediger, “Attempting to Avoid Illusory Memories: Robust False Recognition of Associates Persists Under Conditions of Explicit Warnings and Immediate Testing,” Journal of Memory and Language 39: 508–20 (1998).
11. R. Warren, “Perceptual Restoration of Missing Speech Sounds,” Science 167: 392–93 (1970).
12. A. G. Samuel, “A Further Examination of Attentional Effects in the Phonemic Restoration Illusion,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 43A: 679–99 (1991).
13. R. Warren, “Perceptual Restoration of Obliterated Sounds,” Psychological Bulletin 96: 371–83 (1984).
14. L. F. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York: G. M. Hill, 1900), 113–19.
15. J. Locke, Book IV, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 2 (1690; New York: Dover, 1959).
16. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (1781; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 93.
17. W. Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926).
18. A. Gopnik and J. W. Astington, “Children’s Understanding of Representational Change and Its Relation to the Understanding of False Beliefs and the Appearance-Reality Distinction,” Child Development 59: 26–37 (1988); and H. Wimmer and J. Perner, “Beliefs About Beliefs: Representation and Constraining Function of Wrong Beliefs in Young Children’s Understanding of Deception,” Cognition 13: 103–28 (1983).
19. J. Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929), 166.
20. B. Keysar et al., “Taking Perspective in Conversation: The Role of Mutual Knowledge in Comprehension,” Psychological Science 11: 32–38 (2000).
21. D. T. Gilbert, “How Mental Systems Believe,” American Psychologist 46: 107–19 (1991).
22. Interestingly, the ability to do this increases with age but begins to deteriorate in old age. See C. Ligneau-Hervé and E. Mullet, “Perspective-Taking Judgments Among Young Adults, Middle-Aged, and Elderly People,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 11: 53–60 (2005).
23. Piaget, Child’s Conception, 124.
24. G. A. Miller, “Trends and Debates in Cognitive Psychology,” Cognition 10: 215–25 (1981).
25. D. T. Gilbert and T. D. Wilson, “Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Future Affective States,” in Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. J. Forgas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–97.
26. D. Dunning et al., “The Overconfidence Effect in Social Prediction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58: 568–81 (1990); and R. Vallone et al., “Overconfident Predictions of Future Actions and Outcomes by Self and Others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58: 582–92 (1990).
27. D. W. Griffin, D. Dunning, and L. Ross, “The Role of Construal Processes in Overconfident Predictions About the Self and Others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59: 1128–39 (1990).
28. Kant, Critique, 93.
Chapter 5: The Hound of Silence
1. A. C. Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (1892; New York: Gramercy, 2002), 149.
2. Ibid.
3. R. S. Sainsbury and H. M. Jenkins, “Feature-Positive Effect in Discrimination Learning,” Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association 2: 17–18 (1967).
4. J. P. Newman, W. T. Wolff, and E. Hearst, “The Feature-Positive Effect in Adult Human Subjects,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 6: 630–50 (1980).
5. H. M. Jenkins and W. C. Ward, “Judgment of Contingency Between Responses and Outcomes,” Psychological Monographs 79 (1965); P. C. Wason, “Reasoning About a Rule,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 20: 273–81 (1968); and D. L. Hamilton and R. K. Gifford, “Illusory Correlation in Interpersonal Perception: A Cognitive Basis of Stereotypic Judgements,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 12: 392–407 (1976). See also J. Crocker, “Judgment of Covariation by Social Perceivers,” Psychological Bulletin 90: 272–92 (1981); L. B. Alloy and N. Tabachnik, “The Assessment of Covariation by Humans and Animals: The Joint Influence of Prior Expectations and Current Situational Information,” Psychological Review 91: 112–49 (1984).
6. F. Bacon, Novum organum, ed. and trans. P. Urbach and J. Gibson (1620; Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 60.
7. Ibid., 57.
8. J. Klayman and Y. W. Ha, “Confirmation, Disconfirmation, and Information in Hypothesis-Testing,” Psychological Review 94: 211–28 (1987).
9. A. Tversky, “Features of Similarity,” Psychological Review 84: 327–52 (1977).
10. E. Shafir, “Choosing Versus Rejecting: Why Some Options Are Both Better and Worse Than Others,” Memory & Cognition 21: 546–56 (1993).
11. T. D. Wilson et al., “Focalism: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78: 821–36 (2000).
12. This study was described in a paper that also described some other studies in which people were asked to make predictions about how they would feel if (a) the space shuttle Columbia exploded and killed all the astronauts on board, or (b) an American-led war in Iraq deposed
Saddam Hussein. The spooky thing is that the studies were conducted in 1998—five years before either of these events actually took place. Believe it or not.
13. D. A. Schkade and D. Kahneman, “Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction,” Psychological Science 9: 340–46 (1998).
14. This may be less true of people who live in cultures that emphasize holistic thinking. See K. C. H. Lam et al., “Cultural Differences in Affective Forecasting: The Role of Focalism,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31: 1296–309 (2005).
15. P. Menzela et al., “The Role of Adaptation to Disability and Disease in Health State Valuation: A Preliminary Normative Analysis,” Social Science & Medicine 55: 2149–58 (2002).
16. C. Turnbull, The Forest People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), 222.
17. Y. Trope and N. Liberman, “Temporal Construal,” Psychological Review 110: 403–21 (2003).
18. R. R. Vallacher and D. M. Wegner, A Theory of Action Identification (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1985), 61–88.
19. N. Liberman and Y. Trope, “The Role of Feasibility and Desirability Considerations in Near and Distant Future Decisions: A Test of Temporal Construal Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75: 5–18 (1998).
20. M. D. Robinson and G. L. Clore, “Episodic and Semantic Knowledge in Emotional Self-Report: Evidence for Two Judgment Processes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83: 198–215 (2002).
21. T. Eyal et al., “The Pros and Cons of Temporally Near and Distant Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86: 781–95 (2004).
22. I. R. Newby-Clark and M. Ross, “Conceiving the Past and Future,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29: 807–18 (2003); and M. Ross and I. R. Newby-Clark, “Construing the Past and Future,” Social Cognition 16: 133–50 (1998).
23. N. Liberman, M. Sagristano, and Y. Trope, “The Effect of Temporal Distance on Level of Mental Construal,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38: 523–34 (2002).
24. G. Ainslie, “Specious Reward: A Behavioral Theory of Impulsiveness and Impulse Control,” Psychological Bulletin 82: 463–96 (1975); and G. Ainslie, Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States Within the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
25. The first author to notice this was Plato, who used this fact to make his case for an objective measurement of happiness: “Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? . . . Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or in avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the art of measuring be the saving principle; or would the power of appearance? Is not the latter that deceiving art which makes us wander up and down and take the things at one time of which we repent at another, both in our actions and in our choice of things great and small?” O. Jowett, Plato: Protagoras, facsimile ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1956).
26. G. Loewenstein, “Anticipation and the Valuation of Delayed Consumption,” Economy Journal 97: 666–84 (1987).
27. S. M. McClure et al., “The Grasshopper and the Ant: Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards,” Science 306: 503–7 (2004).
28. Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes, 147.
Chapter 6: The Future Is Now
1. Everyone seems sure that Kelvin said this in 1895, but for the life of me I can’t find the original source to prove it.
2. S. A. Newcomb, Side-Lights on Astronomy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), 355.
3. W. Wright, “Speech to the Aero Club of France,” in The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, ed. M. McFarland (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1908), 934.
4. A. C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (New York: Bantam, 1963), 14. By the way, Clarke defines “elderly” as somewhere between thirty and forty-five. Yikes!
5. G. R. Goethals and R. F. Reckman, “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 9: 491–501 (1973).
6. C. McFarland and M. Ross, “The Relation Between Current Impressions and Memories of Self and Dating Partners,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 13: 228–38 (1987).
7. M. A. Safer, L. J. Levine, and A. L. Drapalski, “Distortion in Memory for Emotions: The Contributions of Personality and Post-Event Knowledge,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28: 1495–1507 (2002).
8. E. Eich et al., “Memory for Pain: Relation Between Past and Present Pain Intensity,” Pain 23: 375–80 (1985).
9. L. N. Collins et al., “Agreement Between Retrospective Accounts of Substance Use and Earlier Reported Substance Use,” Applied Psychological Measurement 9: 301–9 (1985); G. B. Markus, “Stability and Change in Political Attitudes: Observe, Recall, and ‘Explain,’ ” Political Behavior 8: 21–44 (1986); D. Offer et al., “The Altering of Reported Experiences,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 39: 735–42 (2000).
10. M. A. Safer, G. A. Bonanno, and N. P. Field, “ ‘It Was Never That Bad’: Biased Recall of Grief and Long-Term Adjustment to the Death of a Spouse,” Memory 9: 195–204 (2001).
11. For reviews, see M. Ross, “Relation of Implicit Theories to the Construction of Personal Histories,” Psychological Review 96: 341–57 (1989); L. J. Levine and M. A. Safer, “Sources of Bias in Memory for Emotions,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 11: 169–73 (2002).
12. L. J. Levine, “Reconstructing Memory for Emotions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 126: 165–77 (1997).
13. G. F. Loewenstein, “Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 65: 272–92 (1996); G. F. Loewenstein, T. O’Donoghue, and M. Rabin, “Projection Bias in Predicting Future Utility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118: 1209–48 (2003); G. Loewenstein and E. Angner, “Predicting and Indulging Changing Preferences,” in Time and Decision, ed. G. Loewenstein, D. Read, and R. F. Baumeister (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), 351–91; L. van Boven, D. Dunning, and G. F. Loewenstein, “Egocentric Empathy Gaps Between Owners and Buyers: Misperceptions of the Endowment Effect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79: 66–76 (2000).
14. R. E. Nisbett and D. E. Kanouse, “Obesity, Food Deprivation and Supermarket Shopping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 12: 289–94 (1969); D. Read and B. van Leeuwen, “Predicting Hunger: The Effects of Appetite and Delay on Choice,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 76: 189–205 (1998).
15. G. F. Loewenstein, D. Prelec, and C. Shatto, “Hot/Cold Intrapersonal Empathy Gaps and the Under-prediction of Curiosity” (unpublished manuscript, Carnegie-Mellon University 1998), cited in G. F. Loewenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Psychological Bulletin 116: 75–98 (1994).
16. S. M. Kosslyn et al., “The Role of Area 17 in Visual Imagery: Convergent Evidence from PET and rTMS,” Science 284: 167–70 (1999).
17. P. K. McGuire, G. M. S. Shah, and R. M. Murray, “Increased Blood Flow in Broca’s Area During Auditory Hallucinations in Schizophrenia,” Lancet 342: 703–6 (1993).
18. D. J. Kavanagh, J. Andrade, and J. May, “Imaginary Relish and Exquisite Torture: The Elaborated Intrusion Theory of Desire,” Psychological Review 112: 446–67 (2005).
19. A. K. Anderson and E. A. Phelps, “Lesions of the Human Amygdala Impair Enhanced Perception of Emotionally Salient Events,” Nature 411: 305–9 (2001); E. A. Phelps et al., “Activation of the Left Amygdala to a Cognitive Representation of Fear,” Nature Neuroscience 4: 437–41 (2001); and H. C. Breiter et al., “Functional Imaging of Neural Responses to Expectancy and Experience of Monetary Gains and Losses,” Neuron 30 (2001).
20. As far as I can tell, the word prefeel was first used as a song title on the 1999 album Prize, by Arto Lindsay. See also C. M. Atance and D. K. O’Neill, “Episodic Future Thinking,” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 5: 533–39 (2001).
21. T. D. Wilson et al., “Introspecting About Reasons Can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19: 331–39 (1993). See also T. D. Wilson and J. W. Schooler, “Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60: 181–92 (1991).
22. C. N. DeWall and R. F. Baumeister, “Alone but Feeling No Pain: Effects of Social Exclusion on Physical Pain Tolerance and Pain Threshold, Affective Forecasting, and Interpersonal Empathy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (in press).
23. D. Reisberg et al., “ ‘Enacted’ Auditory Images Are Ambiguous; ‘Pure’ Auditory Images Are Not,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology 41: 619–41 (1989).
24. Clever psychologists have been able to design some unusual circumstances that provide exceptions to this rule; see C. W. Perky, “An Experimental Study of Imagination,” American Journal of Psychology 21: 422–52 (1910). It is also worth noting that while we can almost always distinguish between what we are seeing and what we are imagining, we are not always able to distinguish between what we saw and what we imagined; see M. K. Johnson and C. L. Raye, “Reality Monitoring,” Psychological Review 88: 67–85 (1981).
25. N. Schwarz and G. L. Clore, “Mood, Misattribution, and Judgments of Well-Being: Informative and Directive Functions of Affective States,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 513–23 (1983).
26. L. van Boven and G. Loewenstein, “Social Projection of Transient Drive States,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29: 1159–68 (2003).
27. A. K. MacLeod and M. L. Cropley, “Anxiety, Depression, and the Anticipation of Future Positive and Negative Experiences,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105: 286–89 (1996).
28. E. J. Johnson and A. Tversky, “Affect, Generalization, and the Perception of Risk,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 20–31 (1983); and D. DeSteno et al., “Beyond Valence in the Perception of Likelihood: The Role of Emotion Specificity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78: 397–416 (2000).
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