In 2017, media coverage of the #MeToo movement brought attention to the pervasive problem of sexual harassment against women, highlighting several prominent American cases including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Donald Trump. In survey experiments with nationally representative samples in the United States (N=2,843), the Netherlands (N=3,770), and Germany (N=2,357), we tested how thinking about the American cases influences public opinion towards the issue across countries. As predicted, being reminded of the Weinstein, Cosby, and Trump cases increased the evaluation that sexual harassment is a serious problem in the United States. We further tested how thinking about the U.S. cases influences participants’ evaluations of sexual harassment in European countries: Does it pale by comparison to the prominent U.S. cases, or do the cases increase the assessment that harassment is a problem everywhere? All samples evaluated sexual harassment in the European countries as a more serious issue when the U.S. cases were brought to mind, which is compatible with the assumption that sexual harassment is seen as a global gender issue rather than a country-specific issue. These results provide experimental evidence that attention-grabbing cases can shift evaluations of a policy issue within and across countries. — Arya, P., & Schwarz, N. How Prominent Cases of Sexual Harassment Influence Public Opinion Across Countries: The Cases of Cosby, Trump, and Weinstein. Political Psychology.
We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words that predominantly occur alongside positive (or negative) words in natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity when evaluated in isolation, such semantically prosodic words activate the evaluative associations of their usual company, which can color judgment in unrelated domains. For example, people are more likely to infer that “endocrination” (a fictional medical outcome) is negative when it is “caused” (a word with negative semantic prosody) rather than “produced” (a synonymous word without semantic prosody). We review what is known about the influence of semantically prosodic words and highlight their importance for judgment and decision making. — Hauser, D. J., & Schwarz, N. (2023). Semantic prosody: How neutral words with collocational positivity/negativity color evaluative judgments. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(2), 98-104.
Implicit bias reflects the company that words keep (Hauser & Schwarz, 2022)
In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs. male) names collocate with art- (vs. science-) related concepts, and African American (vs. White American) names collocate with negative (vs. positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept “cause” as neutral, but “cause” is frequently followed by negative concepts (e.g., death, pain, and trouble). We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns (Study 1) or pictures (Study 2) after seeing verb primes that were (a) strongly valenced (e.g., hate and comfort), (b) neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., ease and gain), or (c) neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., reply and describe). Throughout, neutral primes with positive (negative) collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive (negative) targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering. — Hauser, D. J., & Schwarz, N. (2022). Implicit bias reflects the company that words keep. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 871221.
Nostalgia and well-being in daily life: An ecological validity perspective (Newman et al., 2020)
Nostalgia is a mixed emotion. Recent empirical research, however, has highlighted positive effects of nostalgia, suggesting it is a predominantly positive emotion. When measured as an individual difference, nostalgia-prone individuals report greater meaning in life and approach temperament. When manipulated in an experimental paradigm, nostalgia increases meaning in life, self-esteem, optimism, and positive affect. These positive effects may result from the specific experimental procedures used and little is known about daily experiences that covary with nostalgia. To address this gap, we aimed to measure nostalgia in ecologically valid contexts. We created and validated the Personal Inventory of Nostalgic Experiences (PINE) scale (Studies 1a–1d) to assess both trait and state-based nostalgic experiences. When measured as an individual difference, the nomological net was generally negative (Study 2). When measured in daily life (Studies 3 and 4), nostalgia as a state variable was negatively related to well-being. Lagged analyses showed that state nostalgia had mixed effects on well-being at a later moment that day and negative effects on well-being on the following day. To reconcile the discrepancies between these studies and the positive effects of nostalgia from previous research, we showed that experimentally induced nostalgic recollections were rated more positively and less negatively than daily experiences of nostalgia (Study 5). These studies show that nostalgia is a mixed emotion; although it may be predominantly positive when nostalgic memories are generated on request, it seems predominantly negative when nostalgia is experienced in the course of everyday life. — Newman, D. B., Sachs, M. E., Stone, A. A., & Schwarz, N. (2020). Nostalgia and well-being in daily life: An ecological validity perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(2), 325.
Despite their prevalence in the marketplace, little empirical attention has been paid to how employee uniforms affect consumer reactions to service experiences. We propose that employee uniforms facilitate the shared categorization of employees and their organization in the mind of the customer, which affects many of the inferences that customers draw following service encounters. Study 1 shows that uniforms lead to greater attribution of responsibility to the company for employee behavior, especially following poor service. Studies 2 and 3 show that uniforms also lead to more assimilation of judgments across employees, increasing the impact of one employee’s behavior on judgments of other employees of the same organization. Study 3 shows that employee uniforms lead to more extreme judgments of the company following service encounters. It also shows that bad (good) service from a uniformed employee makes competing companies look better (worse), indicating that uniforms can elicit contrast effects across companies. In sum, the mere presence of a uniform on an unsatisfactory service or retail employee can damage judgments of the organization and its employees and improve judgments of rival organizations compared to identical service from a nonuniformed employee. Managers seem unaware of these negative consequences. These same principles are likely to apply to a wide variety of uniformed services, including police, military, firefighters, and health-care providers. — Smith, R. W., Chandler, J. J., & Schwarz, N. (2020). Uniformity: The effects of organizational attire on judgments and attributions. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 50(5), 299-312.
Social distrust improves performance on the Wason rule discovery task (Mayo, Alfasi & Schwarz, 2014)
Feelings of distrust alert people not to take information at face value, which may influence their reasoning strategy. Using the Wason (1960) rule identification task, we test whether chronic and temporary distrust increase the use of negative hypothesis testing strategies suited to falsify one’s own initial hunch. In Study 1, participants who were low in dispositional trust were more likely to engage in negative hypothesis testing than participants high in dispositional trust. In Study 2, trust and distrust were induced through an alleged personmemory task. Paralleling the effects of chronic distrust, participants exposed to a single distrusteliciting face were three times as likely to engage in negative hypothesis testing as participants exposed to a trust-eliciting face. In both studies, distrust increased negative hypothesis testing, which was associated with better performance on the Wason task. In contrast, participants’ initial rule generation was not consistently affected by distrust. These findings provide first evidence that distrust can influence which reasoning strategy people adopt. — Mayo, R., Alfasi,D., & Schwarz, N. (in press). Distrust and the positive test heuristic: Dispositional and situated social distrust improves performance on the Wason rule discovery task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
The power of precise numbers (Zhang & Schwarz, 2013)
The role of conversational processes in quantitative judgment is addressed. In three studies, precise numbers (e.g., $29.75) had a stronger influence on subsequent estimates than round numbers (e.g., $30), but only when they were presented by a human communicator whose contributions could be assumed to observe the Gricean maxims of cooperative conversational conduct. Numeric precision exerted no influence when the numbers were presented as the result of an automated procedure that lacks communicative intent (Study 1) or when the level of precision was pragmatically irrelevant for the estimation task (Study 2). — Zhang & Schwarz (2013). The power of precise numbers: A conversational logic analysis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,49, 944-946.
Misinformation and its correction (Lewandowsky et al., 2012)
The widespread prevalence and persistence of misinformation in contemporary societies, such as the false belief that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, must be of public concern. For example, the myths surrounding vaccinations which led some parents to withhold immunization from their children have demonstrably led to a marked increase in vaccine-preventable disease, as well as unnecessary public expenditure on research and public information campaigns to rectify the situation. We first examine the mechanisms by which such misinformation is disseminated in society, both inadvertently and purposely. Misinformation can originate from rumors but also works of fiction, from government and politicians, as well as vested interests. Moreover, changes in the media landscape and the arrival of the internet have fundamentally impacted the ways in which information is communicated and misinformation is spread. We then move to the level of the individual, and review the cognitive factors that often render misinformation resistant to correction. We consider how people assess the truth of a statement and what makes people believe certain things but not others. We answer the question why retractions of misinformation are so ineffective and why efforts to retract misinformation can even backfire and ironically increase misbelief. While ideology and personal worldviews can be major obstacles for debiasing, there nonetheless are a number of effective techniques to reduce the impact of misinformation, and we pay special attention to these factors that aid in debiasing. We conclude by providing specific recommendations for practitioners to aid in the debunking of misinformation. These recommendations pertain to the ways in which corrections should be designed, structured, and applied in order to maximise impact. Grounded in cognitive psychological theory, these recommendations may help practitioners—including journalists, health professionals, educators, and science communicators—design effective misinformation retractions, educational tools, and public information campaigns. — Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (in press). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13, 106-131.
The Presenter’s Paradox (Weaver, Garcia, & Schwarz, 2012)
We introduce the Presenter’s Paradox. Robust findings in impression formation demonstrate that perceivers’ judgments show a weighted averaging pattern, which results in less favorable evaluations when mildly favorable information is added to highly favorable information. Across seven studies, we show that presenters do not anticipate this averaging pattern on the part of evaluators and instead design presentations that include all of the favorable information available. This additive strategy (“more is better”) hurts presenters in the perceivers’ eyes because mildly favorable information dilutes the impact of highly favorable information. For example, presenters choose to spend more money to make a product bundle look more costly, even though doing so actually cheapened its value from the evaluators’ perspective (study 1). Additional studies demonstrate the robustness of the effect, investigate the psychological processes underlying it, and examine its implications for a variety of marketing contexts. — Weaver, K., Garcia, S.M., & Schwarz, N. (2012). The presenter’s paradox. Journal of Consumer Research, 39, 445-460. DOI: 10.1086/66449.
The ‘‘Fair Trade’’ Effect: Health Halos From Social Ethics Claims (Schuldt, Müller, & Schwarz, 2012)
The authors provide evidence that social ethics claims on food packaging (e.g., fair trade) can promote the misperception that foods are lower-calorie and therefore appropriate for greater consumption. In Study 1, participants evaluating chocolate provided lower calorie judgments when it was described as fair trade—a claim silent on calorie content but signifying that trading partners received just compensation for their work. Further establishing this effect, Study 2 revealed that chocolate was perceived as lower-calorie when a company was simply described as treating its workers ethically (e.g., providing excellent wages and health care) as opposed to unethically (e.g., providing poor wages and no health care) among perceivers with strong ethical food values, consistent with halo logic. Moreover, calorie judgments mediated the same interaction pattern on recommendations of consumption frequency, suggesting that amid the ongoing obesity crisis, social ethics claims might nudge some perceivers to overindulge. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed. — Schuldt, J. P., Müller, D., & Schwarz, N. (in press). The “fair trade” effect: Health halos from social ethics claims. Social Psychological and Personality Science. – DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431643
The same quantity can be expressed at different levels of granularity, for example, “one year”, “twelve months” or “365 days”. Consumers attend to the granularity chosen by a communicator and draw pragmatic inferences that influence judgment and choice. They consider estimates expressed in finer granularity more precise and have more confidence in their accuracy (studies 1-4). This effect is eliminated when consumers doubt that the communicator complies with Gricean norms of cooperative conversational conduct (studies 2-3). Based on their pragmatic inferences, consumers perceive products as more likely to deliver on their promises when the promise is described in fine grained rather than coarse terms and choose accordingly (study 4). These findings highlight the role of pragmatic inferences in consumer judgment and have important implications for the design of marketing communications. — Zhang, C.Y.Z., & Schwarz, N. (in press). How one year differs from 365 days: A conversational logic analysis of inferences from the granularity of quantitative expressions. Journal of Consumer Research,39, 248-259.
In public discourse and survey research, global climate change is sometimes referred to as “global warming” and sometimes as “climate change.” An analysis of web sites of conservative and liberal think tanks suggests that conservatives prefer to use the term “global warming” whereas liberals prefer “climate change.” A question wording experiment in the American Life Panel (N = 2267) illustrates the power of these frames: Republicans were less likely to endorse that the phenomenon is real when it was referred to as “global warming” (44.0%) rather than “climate change” (60.2%), whereas Democrats were unaffected by question wording (86.9% vs. 86.4%). As a result, the partisan divide on the issue dropped from 42.9 percentage points under a “global warming” frame to 26.2 percentage points under a “climate change” frame. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed. — Schuldt, J. P., Konrath, S. H., & Schwarz, N. (2011). “Global warming” or “climate change”? Whether the planet is warming depends on question wording. Public Opinion Quarterly, 75(1), 115-124.
Why don’t we learn from poor choices? (Schwarz & Xu, 2011)
Why do consumers need advice on how to spend their money to improve their enjoyment of life? Why don’t they learn this from daily experience? We propose that consumers’ opportunity to learn from experience is impaired because hedonic experiences are fleeting. Once some time has passed, consumers rely on their general knowledge to reconstruct what the experience must have been, which is also the knowledge they use in hedonic prediction and choice. Given this overlap in inputs, prediction, choice and memory usually converge, leaving consumers with the impression that their predictions were correct and their choices wise. The actual in situ experience, however, may have been quite different. We illustrate these dynamics with a product many consumers want to spend their money on, namely, a luxury car. — Schwarz, N., & Xu, J. (2011). Why don’t we learn from poor choices? The consistency of expectation, choice, and memory clouds the lessons of experience. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21, 142-145.
Positive affect and college success (Nickerson, Diener, & Schwarz, 2011)
This study investigated the relation between positive affect and a variety of variables related to college success for undergraduate students attending 1 of 21 academically selective four-year colleges and universities in the United States. Positive affect — cheerfulness — is generally positively related to students’ self-rated academic abilities, self-predicted likelihoods of various college outcomes, self-stated major and academic-degree intentions, and self-reported subjective college outcomes, but negatively related to most college-success variables (e.g., cumulative college grade-point average) recorded by the institution of matriculation, and not related to objective college outcomes reported by the student. Positive affect is thus associated with “positive illusions” about college-success variables. — Nickerson, C., Diener, E., & Schwarz, N. (2011). Positive affect and college success. Journal of Happiness Studies, 12, 717-746. — DOI 10.1007/s10902-010-9224-8 (published online in 2010)
Will this trip be really exciting? (Kim, Park, & Schwarz, 2010)
Two studies examine how different emotions of the same valence influence product evaluation when products make specific emotional claims. Vacation products with adventurous (serene) appeals were evaluated more favorably when participants felt excited (peaceful) rather than peaceful (excited). This emotion-congruency effect was not observed when participants were aware of the incidental nature of their feelings (study 1) and was mediated by the influence of feelings on participants’ expectations that the product will deliver what it promises (study 2). The findings show that consumers differentiate between distinct positive emotions and use them as information in assessing a product’s emotional claims. — Kim, H., Park, K., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Will this trip be really exciting? The role of incidental emotions in product evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 36, 983-991.
The organic path to obesity? (Schuldt & Schwarz, 2010)
Labeling a food as “organic” entails a claim about its production but is silent on its calorie content. Nevertheless,people infer that organic cookies are lower in calories and can be eaten more often than conventional cookies (Study 1). These inferences are observed even when the nutrition label conveys identical calorie content and are more pronounced among perceivers high on pro-environmentalism. Moreover, when evaluating a person with a weight-loss goal, forgoing exercise is deemed more acceptable when the person has just chosen organic rather than conventional dessert (Study 2). These results reflect an “organic/natural”-“healthy” association that is capable of biasing everyday judgments about diet and exercise. — Schuldt, J. & Schwarz, N. (2010).The “organic” path to obesity? Organic claims influence calorie judgments and exercise recommendations. Judgment and Decision Making, 5, 144-150.
Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation and contrast effects (Bless & Schwarz, 2010)
The inclusion/exclusion model provides an integrative framework for conceptualizing the emergence of assimilation and contrast effects in evaluative judgment. The model assumes that feature-based evaluative judgments require a mental representation of the object of judgment (target) and of a standard to which the target is compared. Both representations are context-sensitive and based on the information that is most accessible at the time. The way in which accessible information influences the judgment depends on how it is used. Information that is used in forming a representation of the target results in assimilation effects; information that is used in forming a representation of the standard results in contrast effects. How information is used depends on (i) individuals’ beliefs about whether the information was brought to mind by some irrelevant influence, (ii) the information’s perceived representativeness for the target, and (iii) conversational norms that influence the perceived appropriateness of information use. We summarize the core assumptions of the inclusion/exclusion model, review empirical evidence bearing on it, and highlight its integrative nature.– Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. In M.P. Zanna (ed), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 319-373.
In times of heightened health concerns, like the current swine flu pandemic, everyday behaviors like sneezing may serve as a threat reminder, affecting the perception of related as well as unrelated risks. In two field studies, exposure to sneezing in a public space increased the perceived risk of contracting a serious disease as well as the perceived risk of unrelated threats, namely having a heart attack and dying from crime or accident (Study 1). Moreover, sneezing elicited more negative evaluations of the country’s health care system (Study 1) and shifted policy preferences from allocating resources to the creation of green jobs to allocating resources to vaccine development (Study 2). — Lee, Schwarz, Taubman, & Hou (2010). Sneezing in times of a flu pandemic. Psychological Science, 21, 375-377.
How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others (Chandler & Schwarz, 2009)
Body movements both express and influence how people feel and think. Conceptualizations of this bidirectional influence assume that movement-concept associations can be innate or learned, although evidence for learned associations remained ambiguous. Providing a conservative test of learned movement-concept associations, two studies investigate the influence of culture-specific body movements, which involve an arbitrary relationship between movements and associated concepts. Paralleling the influence of hostility primes, extending the middle finger influenced the interpretation of ambiguously aggressive behaviors as hostile, but did not influence unrelated trait judgments (Study 1). Paralleling the effects of global evaluative primes, upward extension of the thumb resulted in more positive evaluations of the same target along all trait dimensions and higher liking of the target (Study 2). — Chandler, J. & Schwarz, N. (2009). How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,45, 123-128.
Feelings and phenomenal experiences (Schwarz & Clore, 2007)
This handbook chapter reviews the role of moods,emotions, bodily sensations and metacognitive experiences in judgment, information processing, and memory. It is an update of a 1996 chapter in an earlier edition of the same handbook. — Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (2007). Feelings and phenomenal experiences. In E. T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (eds.), Social psychology. Handbook of basic principles (2nd ed.; pp. 385-407). New York: Guilford.
Attitude construction: Evaluation in context (Schwarz, 2007)
Most theories treat attitudes as enduring evaluative tendencies; their dispositional assumptions enjoy intuitive appeal because they are compatible with observers’ preference for dispositional explanations (aka fundamental attribution error). From the actor’s perspective, evaluation stands in the service of action. Any adaptive system of evaluation needs to be highly sensitive to the specifics of the present, turning deplorable “context dependency” into laudable “context sensitivity.” Attitude construal theories conceptualize the context sensitivity of evaluative judgment and provide a parsimonious account of core findings of the attitude literature without assuming enduring dispositions; their assumptions are compatible with theories of situated cognition. – Schwarz, N. (2007). Attitude construction: Evaluation in context. In B. Gawronski (ed.), What is an attitude? Special issue of Social Cognition, 25, 638-656.
Implicit measures of attitudes (Wittenbrink & Schwarz eds., 2007)
This edited volume reviews implicit measures of attitudes, provides advice on their use, and highlights open questions and controversies. The link connects to Guilford’s website with more detailed information.
Mental construal: The inclusion/exclusion model (Schwarz & Bless, 2007)
This chapter reviews the mental construal processes underlying the emergence and size of assimilation and contrast effects. It is an update on the inclusion/exclusion model (Schwarz & Bless, 1992) and summarizes basic principles and applied implications. — Schwarz, N., & Bless, H. (2007). Mental construal processes: The inclusion/exclusion model. In D. A. Stapel & J. Suls (eds.), Assimilation and contrast in social psychology (pp. 119-141). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.
Mental construal in social judgment (Schwarz, 2009)
This chapter provides an introduction to mental construal processes. — Schwarz, N. (2009). Mental construal in social judgment. In F. Strack & J. Förster (eds.), Social cognition: The basis of human interaction. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Reversing the affective congruency effect (Chan, Ybarra, & Schwarz, 2006).
The outcome of a affective priming experiments is shown to critically depend on the frequency of occurrence of the target words used. Low frequency target words (5.7 occurrences per million words) resulted in an affective congruency effect, i.e., faster responses following affectively congruent than incongruent primes. High frequency target words (32.6 occurrences/ million) resulted in a reverse priming effect, i.e., faster responses following incongruent than congruent primes. The size of the congruency effect was larger than the size of the reverse priming effect, thus masking its emergence when word frequency was not taken into account. We propose that target word-frequency has its influence via an accessibility-related mechanism having to do with differences in observed changes in affect between prime and target. –Chan, E., Ybarra, O., & Schwarz, N. (2006). Reversing the affective congruency effect: The role of target word frequency of occurrence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 365-372.
Culture and communication (Miyamoto & Schwarz, 2006)
Cultures differ in their emphasis on the two core functions of communication, conveying information and maintaining the relationship. Because answering machines primarily serve the former function, their use may show cultural differences. Leaving a message is cognitively more taxing for Japanese than Americans, as indicated by poorer performance on a secondary task (Study 1). This performance decrement reflects that Japanese allocated more cognitive resources to tailoring the message to the recipient, consistent with their culture’s higher emphasis on relationship goals. Such cross-cultural differences were not restricted to the laboratory situation. Although equally likely to own an answering machine, Japanese reported a higher rate of hanging up when reaching an answering machine than Americans (Study 2). The difficulties that Japanese experience when leaving a message on an answering machine are partly due to the lack of feedback channel. Theoretical implications are discussed. — Miyamoto, Y., & Schwarz, N. (2006). When conveying a message may hurt the relationship: Cultural differences in the difficulty of using an answering machine. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 540-547.
How warnings become recommendations (Skurnik et al., 2005)
Telling people that a consumer claim is false can make them misremember it as true. In two experiments older adults were especially susceptible to this “illusion of truth” effect. Repeatedly identifying a claim as false helped older adults remember it as false in the short term, but paradoxically made them more likely to remember it as true after a three-day delay. This unintended effect of repetition comes from increased familiarity with the claim itself, but decreased recollection of the claim’s original context. Findings provide insight into susceptibility over time to memory distortions and exploitation via repetition of claims in media and advertising. — Skurnik, I., Yoon, C., Park, D.C., & Schwarz, N. (2005). How warnings about false claims become recommendations. Journal of Consumer Research., 31, 713-724. [ This paper received the 2008 Best Article Award from the Association for Consumer Research.]
Temporal biases (Sanna & Schwarz, 2004)
Explores the role of thought content and ease of thought generation in the emergence and debiasing of temporal biases (confidence, planning fallacy, hindsight, impact bias). –Sanna, L., & Schwarz, N. (2004). Integrating temporal biases: The interplay of focal thoughts and accessibility experiences. Psychological Science, 15, 474-481.
Mood as information: 20 years later (Schwarz & Clore, 2003)
An invited commentary on developments in mood-as-information research 20 years after the initial Schwarz & Clore (JPSP, 1983) paper. — Schwarz, N., & Clore, G.L. (2003). Mood as information: 20 years later. Psychological Inquiry, 14, 296-303.
Accessibility revisited (Schwarz et al., 2003)
A review of “truisms” of social cognition research in light of recent findings. — Schwarz, N., Bless, H., Wänke, M., & Winkielman, P. (2003). Accessibility revisited. In G. V. Bodenhausen & A. J. Lambert (eds.), Foundations of social cognition: A Festschrift in honor of Robert S. Wyer, Jr. (pp. 51-77). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
The construction of attitudes (Schwarz & Bohner, 2001)
This paper argues that people “construct” attitudes on the spot and explores the implications for attitude measurement and the attitude-behavior relationship.Schwarz, N., & Bohner, G. (2001). The construction of attitudes. In A. Tesser & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Intraindividual processes (Vol.1, pp. 436-457). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Attitudes & social judgment (Schwarz, 2000)
Commentary on the state of the art as part of the “Agenda 2000” series of the European Journal of Social Psychology. — Schwarz, N. (2000). Agenda 2000: Attitudes and social judgment — Warmer, more social, and less conscious. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30, 149-176.
Mood and the use of scripts (Bless et al., 1996)
The authors tested whether happy moods increase, and sad moods decrease, reliance on general knowledge structures. Participants in happy, neutral, or sad moods listened to a “going-out-fordinner” story. Happy participants made more intrusion errors in recognition than did sad participants, with neutral mood participants falling in between (Experiments 1 and 2), Happy participants outperformed sad ones when they performed a secondary task while listening to the story (Experiment 2), but only when the amount of script-inconsistent information was small (Experiment 3 ). This pattern of findings indicates higher reliance on general knowledge structures under happy rather than sad moods. It is incompatible with the assumption that happy moods decrease either cognitive capacity or processing motivation in general, which would predict impaired secondary-task performance. — Bless, H., Clore, G. L., Schwarz, N., Golisano, V., Rabe, C., & Wölk, M. (1996). Mood and the use of scripts: Does being in a happy mood really lead to mindlessness? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 665-679.
Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being (Schwarz & Clore, 1983)
Tests the influence of moods on judgments of well-being and provides evidence that the influence is mediated by the use of moods as a source of information. — Schwarz, N., & Clore, G.L. (1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 513 – 523.