You call it ‘Self-Exuberance,’ I call it ‘Bragging.’ Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-Promotion

People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a tradeoff between conveying one’s positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this tradeoff wrong because they erroneously project their own feelings onto their interaction partners. As a consequence, people overestimate the extent to which recipients of their self-promotion will feel proud of and happy for them, and underestimate the extent to which recipients will feel annoyed (Experiment 1 and 2). Because people tend to self-promote excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of the self-promotion to view the self-promoter as less likeable and as a braggart (Experiment 3)

Individual Differences in Correspondence Bias: Measurement, Consequences, and Correction of Biased Interpersonal Attributions

Across consequential attributions of attitudes, ability, emotions, and morality, people make correspondent inferences. People infer stable personality characteristics from others’ behavior, even when that behavior is caused by situational factors. We examined the structure of correspondent inferences and report the development and validation of an instrument measuring individual differences in this correspondence bias (a Neglect of External Demands scale, or “NED”). The NED is internally consistent and distinct from scales and measures of intelligence, cognitive ability, cognitive reflection, general decision making ability, preference for control, and attributional style. Individual differences in correspondence bias predict blaming people for harmful accidents, believing coerced confessions, correcting for job and task difficulty when making performance evaluations and incentive-compatible personnel selections, and separating market and fund performance when making incentive-compatible investments. Fortunately, the tendency to commit correspondence bias can be reduced. Making situational information easier to process debiases those most prone to correspondence bias

Bias Blind Spot: Structure, Measurement, and Consequences

People exhibit a bias blind spot: they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than in others. We report the development and validation of an instrument to measure individual differences in the propensity to exhibit the bias blind spot that is unidimensional, internally consistent, has high test-retest reliability, and is discriminated from measures of intelligence, decision making ability, and personality traits related to self-esteem, self-enhancement, and self-presentation. The scale is predictive of the extent to which people judge their abilities to be better-than-average for easy tasks and worse-than-average for difficult tasks, ignore the advice of others, and are responsive to an intervention designed to mitigate a different judgmental bias. These results suggest that the bias blind spot is a distinct metabias resulting from naïve realism rather than other forms of egocentric cognition, and has unique effects on judgment and behavior

Insight versus Effort. Communicating the Creative Process Leading to New Products

Studies of the creative process identify two relevant sources of new ideas and products: Insight, a sudden, dreamlike, illuminating experience; and effort, deliberate, structured, hard work. With the aim of investigating the communication of the creative process,this research proposes that consumers hold associations between insight and arts, and between effort and sciences. These lay theories induce differential evaluations of new products: consumersevaluate more favorably artistic and scientific products presented as the outcome of insight or effort, respectively. The strength of the proposed effects, however,depends on the level of consumer expertise in the relevant product domain. We maintain that,as audience expertise increases, lay theories become less relevant and the effects of creative process narratives are attenuated. Five studies support the proposed conceptual framework and showthatnarratives of thecreative process influence the evaluations of new products, depending on the product domain and on consumer expertise

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Does exposure to concept products affect consumer judgment of marketed products?

In some industries, it is a common practice to develop concept products, i.e., prototypes that are very advanced both in terms of technical functionalities and of innovativess of their design. These prototypes are usually exhibited at trade shows and at industry events, and typically anticipate the launch of marketed products with similar features. Concept products, however, often feature technical functionalities so innovative, that are difficult to implement on large scale production, and are usually characterized by an very innovative design, often too futuristic to be featured by marketed products without substantial adaptations. By means of theories on the effects of exaggeration and on structural alignment, we argue that exposure to the design and to the functionalities of concept products may have an impact on consumer evaluation of marketed products. Specifically, we predict a positive effect of exposure to a visually exaggerated concept product on judgment of the marketed product (H1): when a novel design is preceded by exposure to its exaggerated form (i.e., the concept product), exaggeration attracts subjects‘ attention to the distinctive features of the design more than in the case of exposure to a non-exaggerated exemplar (Rhodes, Brennan and Carey 1987; Mauro and Kubovy 1992; Rhodes and Tremewan 1996). In addition, the emphasis on the distinctive features of the design provided by exaggeration is feasible to leave a stronger trace in implicit memory. This trace may eventually enhance the fluency in processing those features when other exemplars developed along the same design structure are encountered, thereby improving their evaluation (Reber et al. 1998). We expect, however, functional exaggeration of the concept product to moderate such effect (H2): On the one hand, exposure to an exemplar featuring very high (extreme) levels of performance on a given functional feature may set a standard for the judgment of other exemplars on that same feature, causing a contrast effect that hurts the judgment of other, less performing, exemplars (Herr, Sherman and Fazio 1983; Herr 1986). On the other hand, however, the occurrence of such contrast effect is contingent upon the degree of context-target similarity, i.e., should occur only in case both the prime (concept product) and target (marketed product) are judged as belonging to the same category (Stapel and Winkielman 1998). An exaggerated design (high visual exaggeration) may favor the perception of the concept product as less thematically or temporally related to the marketed product, thus reducing the likelihood of the occurrence of a contrast effect . Concept products may feature different degrees of visual and functional alignment with their respective marketed versions. For instance, companies may invest in developing and promoting a very advanced technological feature within a concept project, but then implement and promote different features in the marketed product. Similarly, companies can develop very innovative and futuristic designs for their concept products, but then design the actually marketed products as less disruptive. We argue that the visual alignment between the concept product and the marketed product influences negatively the judgment of the marketed product (H3), since it activates a 'thematic link' between the two stimuli in consumer mind. The more the two products are visually aligned, the higher likelihood that they are judged as belonging to the same category and thus compared in terms of technical functionalities. Thus, once this link is activated, it leads to an implicit comparison between the technical features of the concept product and those of the marketed product. If the concept product features high functional alignment with the marketed product, then the very advanced technical functionalities of the former are likely to influence negatively the evaluation of the latter, which typically features more moderate performance levels on those same technical functionalities. However, it may be that the concept product features different technical functionalities (low functional alignment) than the marketable car. Therefore, it is less immediate for consumers to engage in comparisons between the features of the concept product and those of the marketed product, since non-alignable differences are harder to compare than alignable differences (Markman and Gentner 1996; Gentner and Markman 1993). In such case, consumers would be less likely to be influenced by the high performance of the concept product when they evaluate the marketed product (H4). We test the four hypotheses in two experimental studies using concept cars and marketed cars as stimuli, in which we manipulate visual and functional exaggeration (Study 1) and visual and functional alignment (Study 2) of the concept product, and assess their effects on the judgment of marketed products. Results support our hypotheses and show that i) exposure to a visually exaggerated concept product positively affects the judgment of a moderate product featuring a similar design, and moderates the negative effects of the concept product functional exaggeration; ii) the degree of functional alignment between a concept product and a marketed product negatively affects the judgment of the marketed product upon exposure to the concept product, with this effect being moderated by the degree of visual alignment between the concept product and the marketed product. Our results contribute to shed light on how exposure to concept products can influence consumer judgment of marketed products, thus emphasizing how this promotional tool may enhance new product performance even in the initial stages of new product launch

Quando la necessità aguzza l’ingegno. L’impatto dei vincoli finanziari sulla creatività

This article analyzes the effects of financial constraints and of their interaction with individual novelty-seeking traits on the outcome of different types of creative tasks such as product ideation and product repair. Three experimental studies examine the effect of financial constraints on creativity of the outcome of a product ideation task, compare the effect of financial constraints with the effect of another type of constraint (i.e., input restriction) on creativity of products ideated, on the amount of resources invested in the development of the creative solution, and on the type of creative process adopted, and following recent recommendations on the adoption of an interactionist perspective for the study of creativity, analyze the effect of financial constraints in interaction with an individual difference such as novelty seeking, which embraces more remote determinants of creative performance, on the creativity of the outcomes to a product ideation task. The results suggest that constrained financial resources may be beneficial to creativity. Specifi-cally, results suggest that financial constraints lead to the ideation of more creative products, even though these products make use of fewer inputs and of a lower budget. Furthermore, while yield-ing outcomes as creative as the ones generated under input constraints, financial constraints in-duce the use of fewer resources and activate a top down rather than a bottom up processing strat-egy in the solution of the problem solving task. In addition, the results show that the effect of fi-nancial constraints is stronger for individuals with inherent tendencies toward novelty seeking, because their stock of experiences and perspectives to put them under stress when facing an un-constrained problem space

Effects of financial constraints and novelty seeking on consumer creativity

Are financial constraints a threat to creativity? Research in management and strategy seems to suggest that abundant financial resources favor innovation and creativity (e.g., Amabile, 1996). Nevertheless, research on creativity has shown that constraints may foster rather than hinder creativity. For some individuals, for instance, time constraints, if not extreme, can enhance creativity by inhibiting conventional responses to a problem and promoting unusual, unexpected ones (Ridgway and Price, 1991; Burroughs and Mick, 2004). Similarly, input resource constraints, i.e., ‗using what is at hand‘ can lead to the ideation of products that are judged as highly innovative and creative, and that are successful in the market (Goldenberg et al., 2001; Moreau and Dahl, 2005). Empirical evidence as to whether financial constraints also increase creativity is lacking. However, the psychology and creativity literatures have provided conceptual and experimental evidence that individuals can be more creative when bounded by constraints than when faced with a ‗blank state‘ (see Finke et al., 1992; Goldenberg et al., 2001). This research contributes to the literature on consumer creativity by analyzing the effects of financial constraints on consumer creativity in both product ideation and problem-solving tasks. In addition, following recent recommendations on the adoption of an interactionist perspective for the study of creativity (Runco and Sakamoto, 1999; Burroughs and Mick, 2004), the effect of constraints is not analyzed in isolation, but in interaction with an individual-difference factor such as novelty seeking traits