A Peter Mcgraw
Biographic Data
| ID | 169236 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Peter Mcgraw |
| GIVEN NAMES | A Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgraw |
| SIGNATURE | MCGRAW A P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0373-1314 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 200 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Humor, Comedy, and Consumer Behavior
Consumers regularly experience humor while buying and using products, procuring services, and engaging in various consumption experiences, whether watching a movie or dining with colleagues. Despite an expansive literature on how humor influences advertisers’ communication goals, far less is known about how humor appreciation and comedy production influence the likelihood of attaining various consumption goals, from experiencing pleasure and maki…
Differentiating what is humorous from what is not
After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor. First, incongruity is not consistently defined. The literature describes incongruity in at least 4 ways: surprise, juxtaposition, atypicality, and a violation. Second, regardless of definition, incongruity alone does not adequately differe…
Humorous Complaining
Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory—which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay—to examine how being humorous helps and hinders complainers. Six studies, which use social media and online reviews as stimuli, show that humorous complaints benefit people who want to warn, ente…
Revisiting External Validity: Concerns about Trolley Problems and Other Sacrificial Dilemmas in Moral Psychology
Sacrificial dilemmas, especially trolley problems, have rapidly become the most recognizable scientific exemplars of moral situations; they are now a familiar part of the psychological literature and are featured prominently in textbooks and the popular press. We are concerned that studies of sacrificial dilemmas may lack experimental, mundane, and psychological realism and therefore suffer from low external validity. Our apprehensions stem from …
The Rise and Fall of Humor: Psychological Distance Modulates Humorous Responses to Tragedy
Humor is a ubiquitous experience that facilitates coping, social coordination, and well-being. We examine how humorous responses to a tragedy change over time by measuring reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy. Inconsistent with the belief that the passage of time monotonically increases humor, but consistent with the benign violation theory of humor, a longitudinal study reveals that humorous responses to Sandy’s destruction rose, peaked, and…
Prototypical prospection: Future events are more prototypically represented and simulated than past events
The results of four experiments support the hypothesis that mental time travel is more prototypical in the future tense than in the past tense. That is, prospection more than retrospection is grounded in scripts, schemas, stereotypes, and other prototypical mental representations of what people, places, and events are typically like. People reported that events in prospection rather than retrospection were more similar to each other and more simi…
From the Commercial to the Communal: Reframing Taboo Trade-offs in Religious and Pharmaceutical Marketing
Although consumers typically expect organizations to profit from marketing goods and services, they also believe that certain organizations, like those that focus on religion and health, should prioritize communal obligations. Indeed, consumers may find it morally distressing when communally focused organizations use overtly commercial marketing strategies like rebranding or value-based pricing. We demonstrate how moral distress and consumer back…
Further evidence for mixed emotions
Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested sever…
Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny
Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated n…
Feeling close: Emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance
The results of 6 experiments indicate that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. People who described events emotionally rather than neutrally perceived those events as less psychologically distant, including embarrassing autobiographical events (Experiment 1), past and future dentist visits (Experiment 2), positive and negative events (Experiment 3), and a national tragedy (Experiment 6). People also perceived an event (d…
Theoretically Framing Relational Framing
Our research program on relational framing leaves many process and normative‐prescriptive issues unresolved. We agree with the three commentators on the usefulness of (a) experimental work that probes the cognitive and affective processes underlying relational‐framing effects, (b) ethnographic work that probes the cultural and historical processes that can shift the boundaries of acceptable commercial transactions, and (c) philosophical analyses …
The affective costs of overconfidence
Positive illusions, though often beneficial (Taylor & Brown, 1988 ), can diminish the pleasure of outcomes. This prediction follows from decision affect theory. We investigated this prediction by measuring the confidence that recreational basketball players felt while making shots and the pleasure they felt with subsequent outcomes. Results showed that most players were overconfident. Those who were more overconfident tended to experience less en…
Expectations and emotions of Olympic athletes
The Limits of Fungibility: Relational Schemata and the Value of Things
Four experiments test predictions on endowment and mental accounting effects of a theoretical perspective that stresses the symbolic-relational significance for consumer transactions and that posits the placement of qualitative boundaries on fungibility. Although people accepted proposals to buy objects acquired in market-pricing relationships as routine, the same proposals in communal-sharing, authority-ranking, and equality-matching relationshi…
Anticipated Emotions as Guides to Choice
When making decisions, people often anticipate the emotions they might experience as a result of the outcomes of their choices. In the process, they simulate what life would be like with one outcome or another. We examine the anticipated and actual pleasure of outcomes and their relation to choices people make in laboratory studies and real-world studies. We offer a theory of anticipated pleasure that explains why the same outcome can lead to a w…
Can people feel happy and sad at the same time
The authors investigated whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. J. A. Russell and J. M. Carroll's (1999) circumplex model holds that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, the evaluative space model (J. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson, 1994) proposes that positive and negative affect are separable and that mixed feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. The authors both replicated…
Can people feel happy and sad at the same time
The authors investigated whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. J. A. Russell and J. M. Carroll's (1999) circumplex model holds that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, the evaluative space model (J. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson, 1994) proposes that positive and negative affect are separable and that mixed feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. The authors both replicated…
Feeling close: Emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance
The results of 6 experiments indicate that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. People who described events emotionally rather than neutrally perceived those events as less psychologically distant, including embarrassing autobiographical events (Experiment 1), past and future dentist visits (Experiment 2), positive and negative events (Experiment 3), and a national tragedy (Experiment 6). People also perceived an event (d…
Differentiating what is humorous from what is not
After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor. First, incongruity is not consistently defined. The literature describes incongruity in at least 4 ways: surprise, juxtaposition, atypicality, and a violation. Second, regardless of definition, incongruity alone does not adequately differe…
Further evidence for mixed emotions
Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested sever…
The Limits of Fungibility: Relational Schemata and the Value of Things
Four experiments test predictions on endowment and mental accounting effects of a theoretical perspective that stresses the symbolic-relational significance for consumer transactions and that posits the placement of qualitative boundaries on fungibility. Although people accepted proposals to buy objects acquired in market-pricing relationships as routine, the same proposals in communal-sharing, authority-ranking, and equality-matching relationshi…
Humorous Complaining
Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory—which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay—to examine how being humorous helps and hinders complainers. Six studies, which use social media and online reviews as stimuli, show that humorous complaints benefit people who want to warn, ente…
From the Commercial to the Communal: Reframing Taboo Trade-offs in Religious and Pharmaceutical Marketing
Although consumers typically expect organizations to profit from marketing goods and services, they also believe that certain organizations, like those that focus on religion and health, should prioritize communal obligations. Indeed, consumers may find it morally distressing when communally focused organizations use overtly commercial marketing strategies like rebranding or value-based pricing. We demonstrate how moral distress and consumer back…
The affective costs of overconfidence
Positive illusions, though often beneficial (Taylor & Brown, 1988 ), can diminish the pleasure of outcomes. This prediction follows from decision affect theory. We investigated this prediction by measuring the confidence that recreational basketball players felt while making shots and the pleasure they felt with subsequent outcomes. Results showed that most players were overconfident. Those who were more overconfident tended to experience less en…
Prototypical prospection: Future events are more prototypically represented and simulated than past events
The results of four experiments support the hypothesis that mental time travel is more prototypical in the future tense than in the past tense. That is, prospection more than retrospection is grounded in scripts, schemas, stereotypes, and other prototypical mental representations of what people, places, and events are typically like. People reported that events in prospection rather than retrospection were more similar to each other and more simi…
Expectations and emotions of Olympic athletes
Theoretically Framing Relational Framing
Our research program on relational framing leaves many process and normative‐prescriptive issues unresolved. We agree with the three commentators on the usefulness of (a) experimental work that probes the cognitive and affective processes underlying relational‐framing effects, (b) ethnographic work that probes the cultural and historical processes that can shift the boundaries of acceptable commercial transactions, and (c) philosophical analyses …
Anticipated Emotions as Guides to Choice
When making decisions, people often anticipate the emotions they might experience as a result of the outcomes of their choices. In the process, they simulate what life would be like with one outcome or another. We examine the anticipated and actual pleasure of outcomes and their relation to choices people make in laboratory studies and real-world studies. We offer a theory of anticipated pleasure that explains why the same outcome can lead to a w…
Can people feel happy and sad at the same time
The authors investigated whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. J. A. Russell and J. M. Carroll's (1999) circumplex model holds that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, the evaluative space model (J. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson, 1994) proposes that positive and negative affect are separable and that mixed feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. The authors both replicated…
The Limits of Fungibility: Relational Schemata and the Value of Things
Four experiments test predictions on endowment and mental accounting effects of a theoretical perspective that stresses the symbolic-relational significance for consumer transactions and that posits the placement of qualitative boundaries on fungibility. Although people accepted proposals to buy objects acquired in market-pricing relationships as routine, the same proposals in communal-sharing, authority-ranking, and equality-matching relationshi…
The affective costs of overconfidence
Positive illusions, though often beneficial (Taylor & Brown, 1988 ), can diminish the pleasure of outcomes. This prediction follows from decision affect theory. We investigated this prediction by measuring the confidence that recreational basketball players felt while making shots and the pleasure they felt with subsequent outcomes. Results showed that most players were overconfident. Those who were more overconfident tended to experience less en…
Expectations and emotions of Olympic athletes
Theoretically Framing Relational Framing
Our research program on relational framing leaves many process and normative‐prescriptive issues unresolved. We agree with the three commentators on the usefulness of (a) experimental work that probes the cognitive and affective processes underlying relational‐framing effects, (b) ethnographic work that probes the cultural and historical processes that can shift the boundaries of acceptable commercial transactions, and (c) philosophical analyses …
Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny
Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated n…
Feeling close: Emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance
The results of 6 experiments indicate that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. People who described events emotionally rather than neutrally perceived those events as less psychologically distant, including embarrassing autobiographical events (Experiment 1), past and future dentist visits (Experiment 2), positive and negative events (Experiment 3), and a national tragedy (Experiment 6). People also perceived an event (d…
Further evidence for mixed emotions
Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested sever…
Prototypical prospection: Future events are more prototypically represented and simulated than past events
The results of four experiments support the hypothesis that mental time travel is more prototypical in the future tense than in the past tense. That is, prospection more than retrospection is grounded in scripts, schemas, stereotypes, and other prototypical mental representations of what people, places, and events are typically like. People reported that events in prospection rather than retrospection were more similar to each other and more simi…
From the Commercial to the Communal: Reframing Taboo Trade-offs in Religious and Pharmaceutical Marketing
Although consumers typically expect organizations to profit from marketing goods and services, they also believe that certain organizations, like those that focus on religion and health, should prioritize communal obligations. Indeed, consumers may find it morally distressing when communally focused organizations use overtly commercial marketing strategies like rebranding or value-based pricing. We demonstrate how moral distress and consumer back…
Revisiting External Validity: Concerns about Trolley Problems and Other Sacrificial Dilemmas in Moral Psychology
Sacrificial dilemmas, especially trolley problems, have rapidly become the most recognizable scientific exemplars of moral situations; they are now a familiar part of the psychological literature and are featured prominently in textbooks and the popular press. We are concerned that studies of sacrificial dilemmas may lack experimental, mundane, and psychological realism and therefore suffer from low external validity. Our apprehensions stem from …
The Rise and Fall of Humor: Psychological Distance Modulates Humorous Responses to Tragedy
Humor is a ubiquitous experience that facilitates coping, social coordination, and well-being. We examine how humorous responses to a tragedy change over time by measuring reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy. Inconsistent with the belief that the passage of time monotonically increases humor, but consistent with the benign violation theory of humor, a longitudinal study reveals that humorous responses to Sandy’s destruction rose, peaked, and…
Differentiating what is humorous from what is not
After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor. First, incongruity is not consistently defined. The literature describes incongruity in at least 4 ways: surprise, juxtaposition, atypicality, and a violation. Second, regardless of definition, incongruity alone does not adequately differe…
Humorous Complaining
Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory—which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay—to examine how being humorous helps and hinders complainers. Six studies, which use social media and online reviews as stimuli, show that humorous complaints benefit people who want to warn, ente…
Humor, Comedy, and Consumer Behavior
Consumers regularly experience humor while buying and using products, procuring services, and engaging in various consumption experiences, whether watching a movie or dining with colleagues. Despite an expansive literature on how humor influences advertisers’ communication goals, far less is known about how humor appreciation and comedy production influence the likelihood of attaining various consumption goals, from experiencing pleasure and maki…
Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Cognitive psychology (6 works) · Humor Studies and Applications (5 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (4 works) · Business (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Media Influence and Health (4 works)