Jennifer S Lerner
Biographic Data
| ID | 1661297 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer S Lerner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer S |
| FAMILY NAME | Lerner |
| SIGNATURE | LERNER J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carnegie Mellon University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1255-4196 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 978 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Author Correction: A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the Covid-19 pandemic
A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the Covid-19 pandemic
The rise of affectivism
Emotion in organizational judgment and decision making
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
Revisiting the Effects of Anger on Risk‐Taking: Empirical and Meta‐Analytic Evidence for Differences Between Males and Females
That anger elicited in one situation can carry over to drive risky behavior in another situation has been described since the days of Aristotle. The present studies examine the mechanisms through which and the conditions under which such behavior occurs. Across three experiments, as well as a meta‐analytic synthesis of the data, results reveal that incidental anger is significantly more likely to drive risky decision making among males than among…
The interaction of testosterone and cortisol is associated with attained status in male executives
Are hormone levels associated with the attainment of social status? Although endogenous testosterone predicts status-seeking social behaviors, research suggests that the stress hormone cortisol may inhibit testosterone's effects. Thus, individuals with both high testosterone and low cortisol may be especially likely to occupy high-status positions in social hierarchies while individuals with high testosterone and high cortisol may not. We tested …
Trust your gut or think carefully? Examining whether an intuitive, versus a systematic, mode of thought produces greater empathic accuracy
Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others-that is, to be empathically accurate. Some are better at this than others, a difference which may be explained in part by mode of thought. Specifically, empathically accurate people may tend to rely more on intuitive rather than systematic thought when perceiving others. Or it may be the reverse: systematic thought may in…
Emotion and Decision Making
A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. We organize and analyze what has …
Perceiving Others’ Feelings: The Importance of Personality and Social Structure
Recent research has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately infer other people’s mental states. In the current research, we tested the hypothesis that, regardless of one’s personal level of status and power, simply believing that social inequality is natural and morally acceptable (e.g., endorsing social dominance orientation, or SDO) would be negatively associated with empathic accuracy.…
Emotion
9.1 What is an Emotion? 9.2 Universals and Cultural Variations in Emotion 9.3 Emotion and Reason 9.4 Social Construction of Emotion 9.5 Emotion and Happiness 9.6 Summary
Emotional Policy: Personal Sadness and Anger Shape Judgments about a Welfare Case
When making decisions about a welfare case, it is reasonable for one's thoughts and feelings about the potential welfare recipient to influence the decision. It is less reasonable for one's “incidental” feelings (e.g., sadness or anger arising from an event in one's personal life) to influence such decisions. In two studies, however, data reveal that incidental anger and sadness do in fact carry over, shaping welfare policy preferences. Study 1 f…
Feelings and Consumer Decision Making: The Appraisal‐Tendency Framework
This article presents the Appraisal‐Tendency Framework (ATF; Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001; Lerner & Tiedens, 2006) as a basis for predicting the influence of specific emotions on consumer decision making. In particular, the ATF addresses how and why specific emotions carry over from past situations to color future judgments and choices. After reviewing the main assumptions and the 5 main principles of the framework, 2 streams of research are pres…
Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition
This paper reviews the impact of anger on judgment and decision making. Section I proposes that anger merits special attention in the study of judgment and decision making because the effects of anger often diverge from those of other negative emotions. Section II presents an Appraisal‐Tendency Framework for predicting and organizing such effects. Section III reviews empirical evidence for the uniqueness of anger's relations to judgment and decis…
Emotion Priming and Attributions for Terrorism: Americans' Reactions in a National Field Experiment
The terrorist attacks of September 11 elicited many forms of negative affect, including anger and sadness. They also elicited a search for explanations. A national field study that experimentally primed emotion evaluated how priming anger and sadness differentially evoked causal judgments about the attacks. It found that priming anger triggered more causal attributions than did priming sadness. Thus, specific emotions, rather than general negativ…
Heart Strings and Purse Strings: Carryover Effects of Emotions on Economic Decisions
We examined the impact of specific emotions on the endowment effect, the tendency for selling prices to exceed buying or “choice” prices for the same object. As predicted by appraisal-tendency theory, disgust induced by a prior, irrelevant situation carried over to normatively unrelated economic decisions, reducing selling and choice prices and eliminating the endowment effect. Sadness also carried over, reducing selling prices but increasing cho…
Early Environment, Emotions, Responses to Stress, and Health
A harsh early family environment is related to mental and physical health in adulthood. An important question is why family environment in childhood is associated with these outcomes so long after its initial occurrence. We describe a program of research that evaluates a model linking these variables to each other. Specifically, we hypothesize that low social competence and negative emotional states may mediate relations between a harsh early fam…
Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism: A National Field Experiment
The aftermath of September 11th highlights the need to understand how emotion affects citizens' responses to risk. It also provides an opportunity to test current theories of such effects. On the basis of appraisal-tendency theory, we predicted opposite effects for anger and fear on risk judgments and policy preferences. In a nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 973, ages 13-88) fear increased risk estimates and plans for precaution…
Experiments Behind the Veil: Structural Influences on Judgments of Social Justice
In two experiments, participants judged the fairness of different distributions of wealth in hypothetical societies. In the first study, the level of meritocracy in the hypothetical societies and the frame of reference from which participants judged alternative distributions of wealth interacted to influence fairness judgments. As meritocracy increased, all participants became more tolerant of economic inequality, particularly when they judged fa…
Are self-enhancing cognitions associated with healthy or unhealthy biological profiles
Self-enhancement is variously portrayed as a positive illusion that can foster health and longevity or as defensive neuroticism that can have physiological-neuroendocrine costs. In a laboratory stress-challenge paradigm, the authors found that high self-enhancers had lower cardiovascular responses to stress, more rapid cardiovascular recovery, and lower baseline cortisol levels, consistent with the positive illusions predictions and counter to th…
Portrait of the self-enhancer: Well adjusted and well liked or maladjusted and friendless
Research has variously portrayed self-enhancement as an indicator of narcissistic defensiveness or as a concomitant of mental health. To address this controversy, the present study used multiple measures of self-enhancement along with multiple measures and judges of mental health, comprehensively assessing their relationship. The results indicated that self-enhancement is positively associated with multiple indicators of mental health and with a …
Fear, anger, and risk
Drawing on an appraisal-tendency framework (J. S. Lerner & D. Keltner, 2000), the authors predicted and found that fear and anger have opposite effects on risk perception. Whereas fearful people expressed pessimistic risk estimates and risk-averse choices, angry people expressed optimistic risk estimates and risk-seeking choices. These opposing patterns emerged for naturally occurring and experimentally induced fear and anger. Moreover, estimates…
Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice
Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events…
The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals
Rage and reason: The psychology of the intuitive prosecutor
This study explores the conditions under which experimentally primed anger influences both attributions of responsibility and the processes by which people make such attributions. Drawing on social functional theory, it was hypothesized that people are best thought of as ‘intuitive prosecutors’ who lower their thresholds for making attributions of harmful intent and recommending harsh punishment when they both witness a serious transgression of s…
Fear, anger, and risk
Drawing on an appraisal-tendency framework (J. S. Lerner & D. Keltner, 2000), the authors predicted and found that fear and anger have opposite effects on risk perception. Whereas fearful people expressed pessimistic risk estimates and risk-averse choices, angry people expressed optimistic risk estimates and risk-seeking choices. These opposing patterns emerged for naturally occurring and experimentally induced fear and anger. Moreover, estimates…
Accounting for the effects of accountability
This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability alter how people think or merely what people say they …
The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals
Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition
This paper reviews the impact of anger on judgment and decision making. Section I proposes that anger merits special attention in the study of judgment and decision making because the effects of anger often diverge from those of other negative emotions. Section II presents an Appraisal‐Tendency Framework for predicting and organizing such effects. Section III reviews empirical evidence for the uniqueness of anger's relations to judgment and decis…
Emotion Priming and Attributions for Terrorism: Americans' Reactions in a National Field Experiment
The terrorist attacks of September 11 elicited many forms of negative affect, including anger and sadness. They also elicited a search for explanations. A national field study that experimentally primed emotion evaluated how priming anger and sadness differentially evoked causal judgments about the attacks. It found that priming anger triggered more causal attributions than did priming sadness. Thus, specific emotions, rather than general negativ…
Emotional Policy: Personal Sadness and Anger Shape Judgments about a Welfare Case
When making decisions about a welfare case, it is reasonable for one's thoughts and feelings about the potential welfare recipient to influence the decision. It is less reasonable for one's “incidental” feelings (e.g., sadness or anger arising from an event in one's personal life) to influence such decisions. In two studies, however, data reveal that incidental anger and sadness do in fact carry over, shaping welfare policy preferences. Study 1 f…
Portrait of the self-enhancer: Well adjusted and well liked or maladjusted and friendless
Research has variously portrayed self-enhancement as an indicator of narcissistic defensiveness or as a concomitant of mental health. To address this controversy, the present study used multiple measures of self-enhancement along with multiple measures and judges of mental health, comprehensively assessing their relationship. The results indicated that self-enhancement is positively associated with multiple indicators of mental health and with a …
Are self-enhancing cognitions associated with healthy or unhealthy biological profiles
Self-enhancement is variously portrayed as a positive illusion that can foster health and longevity or as defensive neuroticism that can have physiological-neuroendocrine costs. In a laboratory stress-challenge paradigm, the authors found that high self-enhancers had lower cardiovascular responses to stress, more rapid cardiovascular recovery, and lower baseline cortisol levels, consistent with the positive illusions predictions and counter to th…
Experiments Behind the Veil: Structural Influences on Judgments of Social Justice
In two experiments, participants judged the fairness of different distributions of wealth in hypothetical societies. In the first study, the level of meritocracy in the hypothetical societies and the frame of reference from which participants judged alternative distributions of wealth interacted to influence fairness judgments. As meritocracy increased, all participants became more tolerant of economic inequality, particularly when they judged fa…
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
The rise of affectivism
The interaction of testosterone and cortisol is associated with attained status in male executives
Are hormone levels associated with the attainment of social status? Although endogenous testosterone predicts status-seeking social behaviors, research suggests that the stress hormone cortisol may inhibit testosterone's effects. Thus, individuals with both high testosterone and low cortisol may be especially likely to occupy high-status positions in social hierarchies while individuals with high testosterone and high cortisol may not. We tested …
Trust your gut or think carefully? Examining whether an intuitive, versus a systematic, mode of thought produces greater empathic accuracy
Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others-that is, to be empathically accurate. Some are better at this than others, a difference which may be explained in part by mode of thought. Specifically, empathically accurate people may tend to rely more on intuitive rather than systematic thought when perceiving others. Or it may be the reverse: systematic thought may in…
A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the Covid-19 pandemic
Revisiting the Effects of Anger on Risk‐Taking: Empirical and Meta‐Analytic Evidence for Differences Between Males and Females
That anger elicited in one situation can carry over to drive risky behavior in another situation has been described since the days of Aristotle. The present studies examine the mechanisms through which and the conditions under which such behavior occurs. Across three experiments, as well as a meta‐analytic synthesis of the data, results reveal that incidental anger is significantly more likely to drive risky decision making among males than among…
The dilution effect: Judgmental bias, conversational convention, or a bit of both
This study explored competing normative interpretations of the dilution effect: the tendency for people to underutilize diagnostic evidence in prediction tasks when that evidence is accompanied by irrelevant information. From the normative vantage point of the intuitive statistician, the dilution effect is a judgmental bias that arises from the representativeness heuristic (similarity-matching of causes and effects). From the normative prospectiv…
Sober Second Thought: The Effects of Accountability, Anger, and Authoritarianism on Attributions of Responsibility
This experiment explored the joint impact of accountability, anger, and authoritarianism on attributions of responsibility. Participants were either accountable or anonymous while watching an anger-priming or a neutral-emotion-priming video clip. In an ostensibly separate study, participants also were either accountable or anonymous while determining responsibility and punishment in fictional tort cases. As predicted, priming anger both simplifie…
Undergraduate Student-Faculty Research Partnerships Affect Studen Retention
This article evaluates the impact of a program promoting student-faculty research partnerships on college student retention. The program, built on the premise that successful retention efforts integrate students into the core academic mission of the university, targets first-year and sophomore undergraduates. Findings of a participant-control group design show that the research partnerships are most effective in promoting the retention of student…
Rage and reason: The psychology of the intuitive prosecutor
This study explores the conditions under which experimentally primed anger influences both attributions of responsibility and the processes by which people make such attributions. Drawing on social functional theory, it was hypothesized that people are best thought of as ‘intuitive prosecutors’ who lower their thresholds for making attributions of harmful intent and recommending harsh punishment when they both witness a serious transgression of s…
Accounting for the effects of accountability
This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability alter how people think or merely what people say they …
Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice
Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events…
The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals
Fear, anger, and risk
Drawing on an appraisal-tendency framework (J. S. Lerner & D. Keltner, 2000), the authors predicted and found that fear and anger have opposite effects on risk perception. Whereas fearful people expressed pessimistic risk estimates and risk-averse choices, angry people expressed optimistic risk estimates and risk-seeking choices. These opposing patterns emerged for naturally occurring and experimentally induced fear and anger. Moreover, estimates…
Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism: A National Field Experiment
The aftermath of September 11th highlights the need to understand how emotion affects citizens' responses to risk. It also provides an opportunity to test current theories of such effects. On the basis of appraisal-tendency theory, we predicted opposite effects for anger and fear on risk judgments and policy preferences. In a nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 973, ages 13-88) fear increased risk estimates and plans for precaution…
Experiments Behind the Veil: Structural Influences on Judgments of Social Justice
In two experiments, participants judged the fairness of different distributions of wealth in hypothetical societies. In the first study, the level of meritocracy in the hypothetical societies and the frame of reference from which participants judged alternative distributions of wealth interacted to influence fairness judgments. As meritocracy increased, all participants became more tolerant of economic inequality, particularly when they judged fa…
Are self-enhancing cognitions associated with healthy or unhealthy biological profiles
Self-enhancement is variously portrayed as a positive illusion that can foster health and longevity or as defensive neuroticism that can have physiological-neuroendocrine costs. In a laboratory stress-challenge paradigm, the authors found that high self-enhancers had lower cardiovascular responses to stress, more rapid cardiovascular recovery, and lower baseline cortisol levels, consistent with the positive illusions predictions and counter to th…
Portrait of the self-enhancer: Well adjusted and well liked or maladjusted and friendless
Research has variously portrayed self-enhancement as an indicator of narcissistic defensiveness or as a concomitant of mental health. To address this controversy, the present study used multiple measures of self-enhancement along with multiple measures and judges of mental health, comprehensively assessing their relationship. The results indicated that self-enhancement is positively associated with multiple indicators of mental health and with a …
Heart Strings and Purse Strings: Carryover Effects of Emotions on Economic Decisions
We examined the impact of specific emotions on the endowment effect, the tendency for selling prices to exceed buying or “choice” prices for the same object. As predicted by appraisal-tendency theory, disgust induced by a prior, irrelevant situation carried over to normatively unrelated economic decisions, reducing selling and choice prices and eliminating the endowment effect. Sadness also carried over, reducing selling prices but increasing cho…
Early Environment, Emotions, Responses to Stress, and Health
A harsh early family environment is related to mental and physical health in adulthood. An important question is why family environment in childhood is associated with these outcomes so long after its initial occurrence. We describe a program of research that evaluates a model linking these variables to each other. Specifically, we hypothesize that low social competence and negative emotional states may mediate relations between a harsh early fam…
Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition
This paper reviews the impact of anger on judgment and decision making. Section I proposes that anger merits special attention in the study of judgment and decision making because the effects of anger often diverge from those of other negative emotions. Section II presents an Appraisal‐Tendency Framework for predicting and organizing such effects. Section III reviews empirical evidence for the uniqueness of anger's relations to judgment and decis…
Emotion Priming and Attributions for Terrorism: Americans' Reactions in a National Field Experiment
The terrorist attacks of September 11 elicited many forms of negative affect, including anger and sadness. They also elicited a search for explanations. A national field study that experimentally primed emotion evaluated how priming anger and sadness differentially evoked causal judgments about the attacks. It found that priming anger triggered more causal attributions than did priming sadness. Thus, specific emotions, rather than general negativ…
Feelings and Consumer Decision Making: The Appraisal‐Tendency Framework
This article presents the Appraisal‐Tendency Framework (ATF; Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001; Lerner & Tiedens, 2006) as a basis for predicting the influence of specific emotions on consumer decision making. In particular, the ATF addresses how and why specific emotions carry over from past situations to color future judgments and choices. After reviewing the main assumptions and the 5 main principles of the framework, 2 streams of research are pres…
Emotional Policy: Personal Sadness and Anger Shape Judgments about a Welfare Case
When making decisions about a welfare case, it is reasonable for one's thoughts and feelings about the potential welfare recipient to influence the decision. It is less reasonable for one's “incidental” feelings (e.g., sadness or anger arising from an event in one's personal life) to influence such decisions. In two studies, however, data reveal that incidental anger and sadness do in fact carry over, shaping welfare policy preferences. Study 1 f…
Emotion
9.1 What is an Emotion? 9.2 Universals and Cultural Variations in Emotion 9.3 Emotion and Reason 9.4 Social Construction of Emotion 9.5 Emotion and Happiness 9.6 Summary
Emotion and Decision Making
A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. We organize and analyze what has …
Perceiving Others’ Feelings: The Importance of Personality and Social Structure
Recent research has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately infer other people’s mental states. In the current research, we tested the hypothesis that, regardless of one’s personal level of status and power, simply believing that social inequality is natural and morally acceptable (e.g., endorsing social dominance orientation, or SDO) would be negatively associated with empathic accuracy.…
Revisiting the Effects of Anger on Risk‐Taking: Empirical and Meta‐Analytic Evidence for Differences Between Males and Females
That anger elicited in one situation can carry over to drive risky behavior in another situation has been described since the days of Aristotle. The present studies examine the mechanisms through which and the conditions under which such behavior occurs. Across three experiments, as well as a meta‐analytic synthesis of the data, results reveal that incidental anger is significantly more likely to drive risky decision making among males than among…
The interaction of testosterone and cortisol is associated with attained status in male executives
Are hormone levels associated with the attainment of social status? Although endogenous testosterone predicts status-seeking social behaviors, research suggests that the stress hormone cortisol may inhibit testosterone's effects. Thus, individuals with both high testosterone and low cortisol may be especially likely to occupy high-status positions in social hierarchies while individuals with high testosterone and high cortisol may not. We tested …
Trust your gut or think carefully? Examining whether an intuitive, versus a systematic, mode of thought produces greater empathic accuracy
Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others-that is, to be empathically accurate. Some are better at this than others, a difference which may be explained in part by mode of thought. Specifically, empathically accurate people may tend to rely more on intuitive rather than systematic thought when perceiving others. Or it may be the reverse: systematic thought may in…
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
Psychology (27 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (10 works) · Anger (9 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (9 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (9 works) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)