Past research has established a connection between regret (negative emotions connected to cognitions about how past actions might have achieved better outcomes) and both depression and anxiety. In the present research, the relations between regret, repetitive thought, depression, and anxiety were examined in a nationally representative telephone survey. Although both regret and repetitive thought were associated with general distress, only regret was associated with anhedonic depression and anxious arousal. Further, the interaction between regret and repetitive thought (i.e., repetitive regret) was highly predictive of general distress but not of anhedonic depression nor anxious arousal. These relations were strikingly consistent across demographic variables such as sex, race/ethnicity, age, education, and income.
The current research demonstrates that construal level has opposing effects on level of aspiration depending on the goal’s temporal distance: A concrete goal leads to a higher level of aspiration in the proximate future, but an abstract goal leads to a higher level of aspiration in the distant future. Two reasons are proposed for this interactive effect. First, these combinations of abstraction and distance afford functional advantages in goal pursuit. Second, given prior demonstrations of the relationship between concreteness and proximity on one hand and abstraction and distance on the other hand, these combinations provide value from fit in that goal pursuit subjectively seems appropriate and important. Taken together, this line of research points to one reason why prior research on the motivating effects of construal level has led to equivocal results by implicating the moderating role of temporal distance.
Computer animation that vividly portrays traffic accidents are increasingly used as analytical and persuasive tools in the American tort system. As this technology continues to develop and its costs further decrease, animations are expected to attract a more diverse audience in areas such as driver education, collision avoidance training, motor carrier preventable accident reviews, reckless homicide investigations and preventable accident countermeasure research. Although impressive and intuitively useful, computer animation is still an emerging technology with benefits as well as pitfalls that are yet to be fully realized. While computer animation may clarify fast-unfolding events, such as traffic accidents, they may also exacerbate hindsight bias, defined as an increased certainty for the predictability of past events, after the events become known. In an experiment that compared judgments of drivers involved in traffic accidents presented via computer animation or text plus diagrams, computer animation was found to increase hindsight bias and make blame judgments more punitive toward the reactive but not the active driver. The impact of computer animation on hindsight bias is also discussed in light of earlier work on counterfactual thinking, point of view, actor-observer effects, and debiasing.
The hindsight bias is an inability to disregard known outcome information when estimating earlier likelihoods of that outcome. The propensity effect, a reversal of this hindsight bias, is apparently unique to judgments involving momentum and trajectory (in which there is a strongly implied propensity toward a specific outcome). In the present study, the propensity effect occurred only in judgments involving dynamic stimuli (computer animations of traffic accidents vs. text descriptions), and only when foresight judgments were temporally near to (vs. far from) a focal outcome. This research was motivated by the applied question of whether the courtroom use of computer animation increases the hindsight bias in jurors' decision making; findings revealed that the hindsight bias was more than doubled when computer animations, rather than text-plus-diagram descriptions, were used. Therefore, in addition to providing theoretical insights of relevance to cognitive, perceptual, and social psychologists, these results have important legal implications.
Prior work has found that when people compare themselves with others they egocentrically focus on their own strengths and contributions and pay less attention to strengths and contributions of the comparison group. As a consequence, individuals tend to overestimate their comparative standing when absolute standing is high and underestimate their comparative standing when absolute standing is low. The present research investigated a rational interpretation of this bias namely, that people are egocentrically focused because they have more knowledge about themselves than about others. Support for this hypothesis was found in three studies, one concerning comparative judgments of responsibility and two others concerning confidence in competitions. These results suggest that there is a rational side to egocentrism in social comparisons.
Visitors contribute significantly to a city’s economy, and enable cities to remain vibrant, attractive cultural centers. Despite this, the travel needs of the visiting population are poorly understood as few studies are conducted with the primary goal of investigating visitors. In this paper the authors describe one highly successful attempt by the Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) to better understand this population’s attitude and use of transit. Responses from 3,689 visitors were collected via intercept locations, email lists, newsletters, and survey flyers. Results indicated that Chicago transit was doing quite well with visitors such that the majority of visitors already used transit. Regional visitors, which were defined as those who live within the RTA six-county Chicago area and traveled to a tourist location, were much more likely to come to Chicago for a day trip with no overnight stay compared to non-regional visitors. Further, even though international visitors are a much smaller segment, they are a promising growth market for transit as they tend to stay in downtown Chicago, stay much longer than domestic visitors, are familiar with transit from their home country, and open to using it. Key recommendations included that transit in Chicago should be made “part of the visitor experience,” which could be achieved by offering a visitor app with relevant information including opening hours and ticket prices of tourist attractions, as well as real-time, GPS-based information on how to access them via transit.
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