No abstract

A growing stream of research is investigating how choices people make for themselves are different from choices people make for others. In this paper, I propose that these choices vary according to regulatory focus, such that people who make choices for themselves are prevention focused, whereas people who make choices for others are promotion focused. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, in particular work on errors of omission and commission, I hypothesize that people who make choices for others experience a reversal of the choice overload effect. In 6 studies, including a field study, I found that people who make choices for themselves are less satisfied after selecting among many options compared to few options, yet, people who make choices for others are more satisfied after selecting among many options compared to few options. Implications and suggestions for other differences in self-other decision making are discussed.

Creativity is a highly sought-after skill. Prescriptive advice for inspiring creativity abounds in the form of metaphors: People are encouraged to "think outside the box", to consider a problem "on one hand, then on the other hand", and to "put two and two together" to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances in the understanding of body-mind linkages in the research on embodied cognition, we explored whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem solving. Our findings from five studies revealed that both physical and psychological embodiment of metaphors for creativity promoted convergent thinking and divergent thinking (i.e., fluency, flexibility, or originality) in problem solving. Going beyond prior research, which focused primarily on the kind of embodiment that primes preexisting knowledge, we provide the first evidence that embodiment can also activate cognitive processes that facilitate the generation of new ideas and connections.

Through a large‐scale field study of 166,215 online restaurant reviews, we found evidence of a distance boosting effect, whereby experiencing spatial distance (i.e., authoring a review about a geographically distant restaurant, rather than proximate one) and temporal distance (i.e., authoring a review after a lengthy delay, rather than immediately) jointly affect review positivity by amplifying consumers' high‐level construals. Although past research has explored the relationship between psychological distance, construal and consumer evaluation, the effects of various dimensions of distance have only been considered in isolation. Our research contributes to past work by testing the effects of experiencing two dimensions of psychological distance simultaneously on construal and consumer evaluations. Moreover, because our data contain naturalistic observations, our research includes a wide range of temporal and spatial distances. We found that the effect of one distance increases the effect of the other. Metaphorically speaking, the effect of one distance is boosted by another.