Michaela Wänke
Biographic Data
| ID | 77750 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michaela Wänke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michaela |
| FAMILY NAME | Wänke |
| SIGNATURE | WÄNKE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Mannheim |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0413-9838 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 242 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
“I even saw four deer grazing”
Purpose This paper aims to examine evolving practices and discourses surrounding psilocybin mushrooms on an online drug forum. Situating use within hybrid digital and ecological contexts, it traces shifts in user engagement before and after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to contextualize localized realities of the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. Design/methodology/approach Using an agential cut framework, the authors conducted a thematic analys…
Dealing with Apps
This article examines how social media and messaging apps mediate everyday access to illicit psychoactive substances in Poland. While the study broadly engages with digital infrastructures, Telegram emerged as the primary hub where drug-related practices converge. Drawing on interviews with 19 mostly young, socio-economically mainstream drug users, we analyze how participants navigate app affordances, convenience, and risk in a prohibitive and st…
Medical Cannabis Industry and the Refracted Public of Polish Drug Users Forum
Drug users use surface, deep, or dark web to enhance their activity. This paper examines the intersection of the digital space and illicit substances and analyzes a Polish drug forum as a refracted public (Abidin, 2021). To illuminate the accommodation of the medical cannabis industry in the social worlds of users, their digital presence below the radar is studied through qualitative thematic analysis of the content of the major Polish surface we…
What You See is What You Get
When examining the influence of income inequality on subjective well-being (SWB), prior research has relied on objective measures of inequality, such as the Gini index. Alternatively, considering the subjective component, research has also investigated how evaluations of inequality, such as perceived (un-)fairness, influence SWB. However, we argue that it is important to also consider the perceived size of inequality independently from evaluation…
“Now I like to know what I smoke”—differentiated cannabis normalization in Polish online discussions
Background This study explores how cannabis has been accommodated over the last 18 years in the social world of an online forum in Poland. It considers users who operate in the context of unhurried normalization and restrictive policy that has barely changed over the last two decades. Simultaneously, these users refer to global cannabis cultures and follow progressive policy developments worldwide.Methods Cannabis-related threads were scrapped fr…
Looking Competent Does Not Appeal to All Voters Equally
Voters generally value competence in politicians. Four studies, all conducted in Germany, show that this is especially pronounced in people of higher compared with lower social class. The first study, with a representative sample ( N 1 = 2239), found that the reported importance of competence in politicians increased with increasing socioeconomic status (SES). This was mediated by self-perceived competence which was higher in participants of high…
How can cannabis social world's perspective inform public health interventions
This paper introduces the concept of social worlds of cannabis in order to capture users' experience of boundary making against stigma or criminalisation of use. In order to problematize the normalization debate amid global, nonlinear liberalizing tendencies, it illuminates how cannabis users' positionality in different conservative societies or legislations, but also their gender or social class interact with their construction of social worlds …
Como a perspectiva do mundo social da cannabis pode informar as intervenções de saúde pública
Este artigo introduz o conceito de mundos sociais da cannabis, a fim de capturar a experiência dos usuários na criação de limites contra o estigma ou a criminalização do uso. A fim de problematizar o debate sobre a normalização no contexto de tendências liberalizantes globais e não lineares, este artigo esclarece como a posicionalidade dos consumidores de cannabis em diferentes sociedades ou legislações conservadoras, mas também o seu gênero ou c…
Overdried, Without Curing? F*Ck, this [Is Supposed to be] Government Licensed Skunk!' Medical Cannabis and the Refracted Publics Within an Online Polish Drug Forum
In this article, we analyze a Polish drug forum as a refracted public by focusing on the intersection of the digital space and illicit substances. To illuminate the reception of the medical cannabis industry in the social worlds of people who use cannabis, we apply qualitative thematic analysis of the content of the major Polish drug forum. The results reveal that there has been a widespread subcultural accommodation of medical cannabis for non-t…
When it pays to be clear
This research demonstrates that the persuasiveness of concrete versus abstract communication in advertisers’ promotional messages depends on how (un)certain people feel. Three lab experiments and one study conducted in a natural setting provide converging evidence that uncertainty (versus certainty) increases the appeal of products advertised concretely (i.e. more specific, tangible, less open to interpretation) rather than abstractly, while keep…
Introduction
Articulation dynamics and evaluative conditioning
People prefer linguistic stimuli with an inward (e.g. BODIKA) over those with an outward articulation dynamic (e.g. KODIBA), a phenomenon known as the articulatory in-out effect. Despite its robustness across languages and contexts, the phenomenon is still poorly understood. To learn more about the effect’s boundary conditions, mental representation, and origin, we crossed the in-out effect with evaluative conditioning research. In five experimen…
When she is Standing Left, she Might be Blamed. Responsibility Attribution for Sexualized Violence Moderated by Rape Myth Acceptance and Benevolent Sexism
The present research contributes to the literature on victim blaming in cases of sexualized violence. Our findings show that even subtle cues, such as positioning in a picture, can influence blame attribution, particularly for people who are motivated to do so. In our experimental study we could show that with increasing rape myth acceptance as well as with increasing benevolent sexism, participants assigned more responsibility for later occurrin…
Społeczne światy użytkowników marihuany w Polsce. Wyznaczanie granic przestrzeni, wiedzy i kontroli
Konsumpcja marihuany w Polsce jest nieco niższa niż w Unii Europejskiej, ale wśród młodzieży osiąga poziom podobny do średniej Wspólnoty. Jest tak mimo konserwatywnego kontekstu politycznego oraz jednych z najbardziej restrykcyjnych rozwiązań legislacyjnych w UE. Dysonans między kulturą użytkowników substancji psychoaktywnych a narracją głównego nurtu na ich temat staje się coraz ciekawszym i wciąż słabo zbadanym polem. Na potrzeby tego artykułu …
Face-to-face
When voters in political elections intend to vote for a candidate who represents their political interests, they cannot avoid being influenced by the visual appearance of the candidates. In fact, many political campaigns are dominated by billboard advertising that mainly focuses on politicians' face portraits. While extant research already showed that a candidate's visual appearance has an impact on electoral outcomes, the present research goes a…
Culture matters! Changes in the global landscape of cannabis
Social worlds and symbolic boundaries of cannabis users in Poland
Many legislations and cultures undergo liberalization regarding cannabis use, and users in Poland make constant references to, and are part of, a burgeoning global cannabis culture. Still they have to relate to conservative drug discourses and legal frameworks. This paper explores this discrepancy between users’ experience on the micro level and the macro context in which they live. The aim is to explore the boundary making processes cannabis use…
What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions
The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather…
The articulatory in-out effect
Fluency in the in-out effect
Reproductive rights or duties? The rhetoric of division in social media debates on abortion law in Poland
This study explores the argumentative schemas used in claim-making and the rhetorical resources for stance-taking in the online abortion law debate in Poland in late 2016. It shows how these discursive devices were used to divide and discredit the opponent in the social media by two social movements: the Stop Abortion coalition of conservative and religious organizations that sponsored the legislative proposal to considerably restrict abortion, a…
Transparency effects on policy compliance
From an ethical standpoint, transparency is an essential requirement in public policy-making. Ideally, policy-makers are transparent and actively disclose the presence, purpose and means of a decision aid. From a practical point of view, however, transparency has been discussed as reducing the effectiveness of decision aids. In the present paper, we elaborate on how transparency affects the effectiveness of defaults. In three experiments, we mani…
Interpersonal accuracy in a political context is moderated by the extremity of one's political attitudes
Does money change political views? – An investigation of money priming and the preference for right-wing politics
In a multistudy approach across seven studies we explored whether, as suggested by previous research, money primes affect people’s political orientation. Across the studies we used different dependent variables and samples, and we combined the results in a small-scale meta-analysis to test two competing hypotheses. Independent of the measures and experimental setting, our findings did not indicate that money primes lead to stronger right-wing ori…
A Fresh Look on Money Priming
Two studies demonstrated that subjective socioeconomic status moderates the effects of reminders of money on the endorsement of the socioeconomic system. Whether reminders of money increased or decreased system justification (Study 1) and the belief in a just world (Study 2) depended on participants’ subjectively experienced standing in the social hierarchy. These findings were backed up by a small-scale meta-analysis across our entire data ( N =…
Effects of Atypical Exemplars on Racial Beliefs
Awareness of the influence as a determinant of assimilation versus contrast
In the present study, subjects had to generate an evaluative judgment about a target person on the basis of his behaviour that had both positive and negative implications. In a previous phase of the study that was ostensibly unrelated to the judgment task, the relevant trait categories were primed. Subsequently, half of the subjects were reminded of the priming episode. Consistent with earlier research (e.g. Lombardi, Higgins and Bargh, 1987; New…
There Are Many Reasons to Drive a BMW
The effects of imagined versus actual ease of self-generating product-related information were investigated. An ad invited recipients to name either one reason or 10 reasons for (against) choosing a BMW over a Mercedes. Participants who complied with the task experienced the retrieval of one reason as easier than the retrieval of 10 reasons. Participants who did not comply nevertheless imagined the former as easier than the latter. Independent of…
Temporal distance and ease of retrieval
On the relations between distinct aspects of psychological distance
Discrepant fluency increases subjective truth
Asking Comparative Questions
Questions assessing comparative judgments are often phrased as directed comparisons, that is, a stimulus A (subject) is to be compared to a stimulus B (referent); for example, “Is tennis more exciting than soccer or less exciting?” Tversky's work on judgment of similarity indicated that comparing A to B may result in different similarity judgments than comparing B to A. The four studies reported in this article extend this work from judgments of …
Personal prayer buffers self-control depletion
Money and Thinking
The idea of money reminds consumers of personal strength and resources. Such cues have been found to increase the level of mental construal. Consequently, it was hypothesized and found in five experiments that reminders of money trigger abstract (vs. concrete) mental construals. Participants were primed with money or money-unrelated concepts. Money primes caused a preference for abstract over concrete action identifications (experiment 1), instig…
The color red reduces snack food and soft drink intake
Transparency effects on policy compliance
From an ethical standpoint, transparency is an essential requirement in public policy-making. Ideally, policy-makers are transparent and actively disclose the presence, purpose and means of a decision aid. From a practical point of view, however, transparency has been discussed as reducing the effectiveness of decision aids. In the present paper, we elaborate on how transparency affects the effectiveness of defaults. In three experiments, we mani…
Toward a deeper understanding of the ecological origins of distance construal
The abstractness of luxury
Mix me a list
Comparative Judgments as a Function of the Direction of Comparison Versus Word Order
Previous findings showed that comparative judgments in survey questions are largely affected by the direction of comparison, that is, whether the question asks respondents to compare A (subject) to B (referent) or B to A. These asymmetry effects were attributed to the dynamics that respondents attend differently to the features of an object depending on whether it functions as the subject or the referent of a comparison. Most research on directio…
Fluency in the in-out effect
Interpersonal accuracy in a political context is moderated by the extremity of one's political attitudes
How can cannabis social world's perspective inform public health interventions
This paper introduces the concept of social worlds of cannabis in order to capture users' experience of boundary making against stigma or criminalisation of use. In order to problematize the normalization debate amid global, nonlinear liberalizing tendencies, it illuminates how cannabis users' positionality in different conservative societies or legislations, but also their gender or social class interact with their construction of social worlds …
Como a perspectiva do mundo social da cannabis pode informar as intervenções de saúde pública
Este artigo introduz o conceito de mundos sociais da cannabis, a fim de capturar a experiência dos usuários na criação de limites contra o estigma ou a criminalização do uso. A fim de problematizar o debate sobre a normalização no contexto de tendências liberalizantes globais e não lineares, este artigo esclarece como a posicionalidade dos consumidores de cannabis em diferentes sociedades ou legislações conservadoras, mas também o seu gênero ou c…
Overdried, Without Curing? F*Ck, this [Is Supposed to be] Government Licensed Skunk!' Medical Cannabis and the Refracted Publics Within an Online Polish Drug Forum
In this article, we analyze a Polish drug forum as a refracted public by focusing on the intersection of the digital space and illicit substances. To illuminate the reception of the medical cannabis industry in the social worlds of people who use cannabis, we apply qualitative thematic analysis of the content of the major Polish drug forum. The results reveal that there has been a widespread subcultural accommodation of medical cannabis for non-t…
The articulatory in-out effect
Making Context Effects Work for You
Journal Article MAKING CONTEXT EFFECTS WORK FOR YOU: SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVING DATA QUALITY FROM A CONSTRUAL PERSPECTIVE Get access Michaela Wänke Michaela Wänke Michaela Wanke is a research associate at the Universitat Heidelberg, Germany. Her research focuses on construal processes in social and consumer judgment, and its application to survey methodology and market research. Correspondence should be addressed to Michaela Wanke, Psychologisches…
Awareness of the influence as a determinant of assimilation versus contrast
In the present study, subjects had to generate an evaluative judgment about a target person on the basis of his behaviour that had both positive and negative implications. In a previous phase of the study that was ostensibly unrelated to the judgment task, the relevant trait categories were primed. Subsequently, half of the subjects were reminded of the priming episode. Consistent with earlier research (e.g. Lombardi, Higgins and Bargh, 1987; New…
Subjective Assessments and Evaluations of Change
Selected judgmental processes that bear on how individuals determine if things have changed in their life, and whether these changes are for the better or worse, are reviewed. In the absence of systematic research into this issue, we draw on related research into the construal and evaluation of the past, present, and future to offer educated guesses, to identify theoretical gaps, and to highlight issues for future research
Effects of Atypical Exemplars on Racial Beliefs
Asking Comparative Questions
Questions assessing comparative judgments are often phrased as directed comparisons, that is, a stimulus A (subject) is to be compared to a stimulus B (referent); for example, “Is tennis more exciting than soccer or less exciting?” Tversky's work on judgment of similarity indicated that comparing A to B may result in different similarity judgments than comparing B to A. The four studies reported in this article extend this work from judgments of …
Comparative Judgments as a Function of the Direction of Comparison Versus Word Order
Previous findings showed that comparative judgments in survey questions are largely affected by the direction of comparison, that is, whether the question asks respondents to compare A (subject) to B (referent) or B to A. These asymmetry effects were attributed to the dynamics that respondents attend differently to the features of an object depending on whether it functions as the subject or the referent of a comparison. Most research on directio…
Making Context Effects Work for You
Journal Article MAKING CONTEXT EFFECTS WORK FOR YOU: SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVING DATA QUALITY FROM A CONSTRUAL PERSPECTIVE Get access Michaela Wänke Michaela Wänke Michaela Wanke is a research associate at the Universitat Heidelberg, Germany. Her research focuses on construal processes in social and consumer judgment, and its application to survey methodology and market research. Correspondence should be addressed to Michaela Wanke, Psychologisches…
There Are Many Reasons to Drive a BMW
The effects of imagined versus actual ease of self-generating product-related information were investigated. An ad invited recipients to name either one reason or 10 reasons for (against) choosing a BMW over a Mercedes. Participants who complied with the task experienced the retrieval of one reason as easier than the retrieval of 10 reasons. Participants who did not comply nevertheless imagined the former as easier than the latter. Independent of…
Temporal distance and ease of retrieval
When impulses take over
Recent theories in social psychology suggest that explicitly measured attitudes are particularly valuable for the prediction of deliberate, controlled behaviour. In contrast, implicitly measured attitudes are assumed to be more important for the prediction of less controlled, more impulsive behaviour. Yet, conclusive evidence for the differential predictive validity of both measures is scarce. We hypothesized that limitations of different control…
Discrepant fluency increases subjective truth
Grandparental investment
The influence that grandparents have on the life history traits of their descendants has been studied extensively. However, no attention has been paid to the potential influence a grandparent's own reproductive history has on the investment they make in their grandchildren. We use data from 658 Swiss grandchildren and 591 of their grandparents to investigate whether grandparents' reproductive scheduling and family size influence the amount of inv…
Mix me a list
Social psychology of consumer behavior
This volume provides coverage of the latest social-psychological research into consumer behavior, including cognitive and affective processes, media influences, and self-regulation
The Truth About the Truth
Repetition has been shown to increase subjective truth ratings of trivia statements. This truth effect can be measured in two ways: (a) as the increase in subjective truth from the first to the second encounter ( within-items criterion) and (b) as the difference in truth ratings between repeated and other new statements ( between-items criterion). Qualitative differences are assumed between the processes underlying both criteria. A meta-analysis …
Political Ideology at Face Value
Four studies demonstrated that perceivers were able to identify the political attitudes of unknown politicians on a left–right dimension when the targets were merely shown in photographs. In Study 1, party membership provided an objective criterion for political attitudes, whereas actual voting behavior served as a validity criterion in Studies 2, 3a, and 3b. All studies yielded ratings highly chance accuracy. Additional ratings suggest that perc…
Good weather for Schwarz and Clore
This article is a tribute to the "mood as information" paradigm in general and the seminal weather study (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) in particular. Schwarz and Clore used a natural variation in weather to induce different mood states and to further show that participants reported higher life satisfaction on sunny days than on rainy days, presumably because they misattributed their mood to their life satisfaction. Based on the mood-as-information heur…
The abstractness of luxury
The color red reduces snack food and soft drink intake
On the relations between distinct aspects of psychological distance
For My Own Benefit or for the Benefit of Others
Persuading people to follow a behavioral recommendation can be attempted by outlining the negative consequences for those performing this behavior or by outlining the negative consequences for others. Prior research has shown that reminding people of money (e.g., touching money) leads to higher self-sufficiency resulting in more self-focused and less social behavior. Consequently, the authors show that touching money also affects the persuasivene…
Recognition and Approach Responses Toward Threatening Objects
Previous research suggests that positive stimuli are often approached as well as recognized faster than negative stimuli. We argue that this effect does not hold if negative stimuli are associated with threat. Based on fear module theory ( Öhman & Mineka, 2001 , 2003 ), we argue that individuals recognize threatening stimuli faster than positive stimuli because of a constant monitoring of the environment for threatening objects. Moreover, based o…
Personal prayer buffers self-control depletion
Money and Thinking
The idea of money reminds consumers of personal strength and resources. Such cues have been found to increase the level of mental construal. Consequently, it was hypothesized and found in five experiments that reminders of money trigger abstract (vs. concrete) mental construals. Participants were primed with money or money-unrelated concepts. Money primes caused a preference for abstract over concrete action identifications (experiment 1), instig…
Attitudes and Attitude Change
Attitudes and attitude change remain core topics of contemporary social psychology. This selective review emphasizes work published from 2005 to 2009. It addresses constructionist and stable-entity conceptualizations of attitude, the distinction between implicit and explicit measures of attitude, and implications of the foregoing for attitude change. Associative and propositional processes in attitude change are considered at a general level and …
Personal prayer counteracts self-control depletion
Psychology (46 works) · Social Psychology (31 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Cognitive psychology (17 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (11 works) · Sociology (11 works)