Michael I Norton
Biographic Data
| ID | 187596 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael I Norton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael I |
| FAMILY NAME | Norton |
| SIGNATURE | NORTON M I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 587 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Couples Underestimate Positive Affective Reactions to Financial Conversations
Falling in love, moving in together, and raising a family are exciting milestones for couples; importantly, money is a critical component of all these experiences. While couples generally merge their financial lives as their relationship becomes more committed, partners often struggle with financial communication. Across three diary studies using a two-wave prospective–retrospective design, we examine how romantic partners perceive—and ultimately…
Collective streaks motivate prosocial behavior
We introduce a novel method for perpetuating prosocial behavior: highlighting collective streaks of behavior across individuals (e.g., “the last X people in a row have done it”). In 11 experiments (total N = 12,688), asking people to join a short ongoing streak of charitable donors was more effective than informing them of a high percentage of previous donors (e.g., “X% of people have done it”), because streaks increased feelings of personal impa…
The egalitarian value of counterfeit goods
The present research demonstrates a novel driver of the growing demand for counterfeit luxury goods: perceptions of income inequality. Across five studies, using different samples and counterfeit luxury goods, we find that as perceptions of income inequality increase, consumers value counterfeit luxury products for their “egalitarian value”—a value associated with counterfeits' perceived ability to restore equality in society. Consumers perceive …
Friendship fallout and bailout backlash
Six studies explore the psychology of borrowing and lending. Across two different contexts—friends lending to friends and taxpayers bailing out businesses—lenders are angrier with borrowers who specifically make hedonic (as opposed to utilitarian) purchases with loaned money. This anger is pronounced enough that lenders' negative feelings toward borrowers who made past hedonic (vs. utilitarian) purchases remains even after they have been fully re…
Perceived and Ideal Inequality in University Endowments in the United States
Whether and which university to attend are among the most financially consequential choices most people make. Universities with relatively larger endowments can offer better education experiences, which can drive inequality in students’ subsequent outcomes. We first explore three interrelated questions: the current educational inequality across U.S. universities, people’s perceptions of this inequality, and their desired inequality. Educational i…
The adoption of conservation practices in the Corn Belt
Substantial evidence has shown that involvement in peer-to-peer farming networks influences whether a farmer decides to try a new practice. Formally organized farmer networks are emerging as a unique entity that blend the benefits of decentralized exchange of farmer knowledge within the structure of an organization providing a variety of sources of information and forms of engagement. We define formal farmer networks as farmer networks with a dis…
Quantification of evaluations
White (but Not Black) Americans Continue to See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game; White Conservatives (but Not Moderates or Liberals) See Themselves as Losing
In a 2011 article in this journal entitled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” ( Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 215–218), Norton and Sommers assessed Black and White Americans’ perceptions of anti-Black and anti-White bias across the previous 6 decades—from the 1950s to the 2000s. They presented two key findings: White (but not Black) respondents perceived decreases in anti-Black bias to be associated with i…
Consumers Value Effort over Ease When Caring for Close Others
Many products and services are designed to make caregiving easier, from premade meals for feeding families to robo-cribs that automatically rock babies to sleep. Yet, using these products may come with a cost: consumers may feel they have not exerted enough effort. Nine experiments show that consumers feel like better caregivers when they put more effort into caregiving tasks than when they use effort-reducing products to perform such tasks. The …
Whose pay should be cut in economic crises? Consumers prefer firms that prioritize paying employees over CEOs
Four experiments examine the impact of a firm deciding to no longer pay salaries for executives versus employees on consumer behavior, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 1 explores the effect of announcing either pay cessations or continued pay for either CEO or employees, and shows that firms’ commitment to maintaining employee pay leads to the most positive consumer reactions. Study 2 examines the effects of simultaneou…
When alterations are violations
From Catholics performing the sign of the cross since the 4th century to Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1890s, group rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions) have strikingly consistent features over time. Seven studies (N = 4,213) document the sacrosanct nature of rituals: Because group rituals symbolize sacred group values, even minor alterations to them provoke moral outrage and punishment. In Pilot Studie…
Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment
Time Use and Happiness of Millionaires
How do the very wealthy spend their time, and how does time use relate to well-being? In two studies in the Netherlands, the affluent ( N = 863; N = 690) and the general population ( N = 1,232; N = 306) spent time in surprisingly similar ways such as by spending the same amount of time working. Yet the nature of their time use differed in critical ways that are related to life satisfaction. In Study 1, millionaires spent more time engaged in acti…
Does spending money on others promote happiness
5,199), participants who recalled a prosocial (vs. personal) spending memory reported greater happiness but differences were small. Taken together, these studies support the hypothesis that spending money on others does promote happiness, but demonstrate that the magnitude of the effect depends on several methodological features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
Invisible inequality leads to punishing the poor and rewarding the rich
Four experiments examine how lack of awareness of inequality affect behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to rewarding the poor. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants who played a public goods game – and were assigned incomes reflective of the US income distribution either at random or on merit – p…
Handshaking promotes deal-making by signaling cooperative intent
We examine how a simple handshake-a gesture that often occurs at the outset of social interactions-can influence deal-making. Because handshakes are social rituals, they are imbued with meaning beyond their physical features. We propose that during mixed-motive interactions, a handshake is viewed as a signal of cooperative intent, increasing people's cooperative behavior and affecting deal-making outcomes. In Studies 1a and 1b, pairs who chose to…
The Asymmetric Experience of Positive and Negative Economic Growth
Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries, BRFSS data on 2.3 million US respondents, and Eurobarometer data that cover multiple business cycles over four decades. This research provides a new perspective on the welfare cost …
Budging beliefs, nudging behaviour
Nudges have become a popular tool for behaviour change; but, some interventions fail to replicate, even when the identical, previously successful intervention is used. One cause of this problem is that people default to using some of or all of the previously-successful existing nudges for any problem—the “kitchen sink” approach. We argue that the success of an intervention depends on understanding people’s current behaviour and beliefs to ensure …
Enacting rituals to improve self-control
Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this hypothesis in 6 experiments. A field experiment showed that engaging in a pre-eating ritual over a 5-day period helped participants reduce calorie intake (Experiment 1). Pairing a ritu…
(Mis)perceptions of inequality
Agent-Based Modeling
Agent-based modeling is a long-standing but underused method that allows researchers to simulate artificial worlds for hypothesis testing and theory building. Agent-based models (ABMs) offer unprecedented control and statistical power by allowing researchers to precisely specify the behavior of any number of agents and observe their interactions over time. ABMs are especially useful when investigating group behavior or evolutionary processes and …
Humblebragging
Self-presentation is a fundamental aspect of social life, with myriad critical outcomes dependent on others' impressions. We identify and offer the first empirical investigation of a prevalent, yet understudied, self-presentation strategy: humblebragging. Across 9 studies, including a week-long diary study and a field experiment, we identify humblebragging-bragging masked by a complaint or humility-as a common, conceptually distinct, and ineffect…
Artful paltering
Paltering is the active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression. Across 2 pilot studies and 6 experiments, we identify paltering as a distinct form of deception. Paltering differs from lying by omission (the passive omission of relevant information) and lying by commission (the active use of false statements). Our findings reveal that paltering is common in negotiations and that many negotiators prefer to palter than to lie b…
Motivated Bayesians
Research yields ample evidence that individual's behavior often reflects an apparent concern for moral considerations. A natural way to interpret evidence of such motives using an economic framework is to add an argument to the utility function such that agents obtain utility both from outcomes that yield only personal benefits and from acting kindly, honestly, or according to some other notion of "right." Indeed, such interpretations can account…
The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology
Why do consumers make the purchases they do, and which ones make them truly happy? Why are consumers willing to spend huge sums of money to appear high status? This handbook addresses these key questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive overview of consumer psychology, examining cutting-edge research at the individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. Leading scholars summarize past and current findings and consider future lines of i…
This Old Stereotype
Americans stereotype elderly people as warm and incompetent, following from perceptions of them as noncompetitive and low status, respectively. This article extends existing research regarding stereotyping of older people in two ways. First, we discuss whether the mixed elderly stereotype is unique to American culture. Data from six non‐U.S. countries, including three collectivist cultures, demonstrate elderly stereotypes are consistent across va…
Seeing race and seeming racist? Evaluating strategic colorblindness in social interaction
One strategy practiced by many Whites to regulate the appearance of prejudice during social interaction is to avoid talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference. Four experiments involving a dyadic task investigated antecedents and consequences of this tendency. However, this tendency was often counterproductive, as avoiding race during interracial interaction predicted negative nonverbal behavior (Study 1), a relationship mediated…
Prosocial spending and well-being
This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: Human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). In Study 1, survey data from 136 countries were examined and showed that prosocial spending is associated with greater happiness around the world, in poor and rich countries alike. To test for causality, in Studies 2a and 2b, we used exper…
Aid in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
This research examines inferences about the emotional states of ingroup and outgroup victims after a natural disaster, and whether these inferences predict intergroup helping. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the southern United States, White and non-White participants were asked to infer the emotional states of an individualized Black or White victim, and were asked to report their intentions to help such victims. Overall, participants b…
Learning (not) to talk about race
Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development
Lay Theories About White Racists
Psychological theories of racial bias assume a pervasive motivation to avoid appearing racist, yet researchers know little regarding laypeople's theories about what constitutes racism. By investigating lay theories of White racism across both college and community samples, we seek to develop a more complete understanding of the nature of race-related norms, motivations, and processes of social perception in the contemporary United States. Factor …
Men as cultural ideals
Four studies tested whether cultural values moderate the content of gender stereotypes, such that male stereotypes more closely align with core cultural values (specifically, individualism vs. collectivism) than do female stereotypes. In Studies 1 and 2, using different measures, Americans rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas Koreans rated men as more collectivistic than women. In Study 3, bicultural Korean Americans who completed…
From student to superhero
Less is more
The present research shows that although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking. Thus, ambiguity--lacking information about another--leads to liking, whereas familiarity--acquiring more information--can breed contempt. This "less is more" effect is due to the cascading nature of dissimilarity: Once evidence of dissimilarity is encountered, subsequent …
Casuistry and Social Category Bias
This research explored cases where people are drawn to make judgments between individuals based on questionable criteria, in particular those individuals' social group memberships. We suggest that individuals engage in casuistry to mask biased decision making, by recruiting more acceptable criteria to justify such decisions. We present 6 studies that demonstrate how casuistry licenses people to judge on the basis of social category information bu…
Humblebragging
Self-presentation is a fundamental aspect of social life, with myriad critical outcomes dependent on others' impressions. We identify and offer the first empirical investigation of a prevalent, yet understudied, self-presentation strategy: humblebragging. Across 9 studies, including a week-long diary study and a field experiment, we identify humblebragging-bragging masked by a complaint or humility-as a common, conceptually distinct, and ineffect…
Who Benefits from Religion
Vicarious dissonance
Three studies support the vicarious dissonance hypothesis that individuals change their attitudes when witnessing members of important groups engage in inconsistent behavior. Study 1, in which participants observed an actor in an induced-compliance paradigm, documented that students who identified with their college supported an issue more after hearing an ingroup member make a counterattitudinal speech in favor of that issue. In Study 2, vicario…
Does spending money on others promote happiness
5,199), participants who recalled a prosocial (vs. personal) spending memory reported greater happiness but differences were small. Taken together, these studies support the hypothesis that spending money on others does promote happiness, but demonstrate that the magnitude of the effect depends on several methodological features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
Consequence-Cause Matching
This article documents a bias in people’s causal inferences, showing that people nonnormatively consider an event’s consequences when inferring its causes. Across experiments, participants’ inferences about event causes were systematically affected by how similar (in both size and valence) those causes were to event consequences, even when the consequences were objectively uninformative about the causes. For example, people inferred that a produc…
Spin (and Pitch) Doctors
Motivated Bayesians
Research yields ample evidence that individual's behavior often reflects an apparent concern for moral considerations. A natural way to interpret evidence of such motives using an economic framework is to add an argument to the utility function such that agents obtain utility both from outcomes that yield only personal benefits and from acting kindly, honestly, or according to some other notion of "right." Indeed, such interpretations can account…
The preference for potential
When people seek to impress others, they often do so by highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, we demonstrate that people often prefer potential rather than achievement when evaluating others. Indeed, compared with references to achievement (e.g., "this person has won an award for his work"), references to potential (e.g., "this person could win an award for his work") appear to stimulate greater inte…
Budging beliefs, nudging behaviour
Nudges have become a popular tool for behaviour change; but, some interventions fail to replicate, even when the identical, previously successful intervention is used. One cause of this problem is that people default to using some of or all of the previously-successful existing nudges for any problem—the “kitchen sink” approach. We argue that the success of an intervention depends on understanding people’s current behaviour and beliefs to ensure …
Enacting rituals to improve self-control
Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this hypothesis in 6 experiments. A field experiment showed that engaging in a pre-eating ritual over a 5-day period helped participants reduce calorie intake (Experiment 1). Pairing a ritu…
When dreaming is believing
This research investigated laypeople's interpretation of their dreams. Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar waking thoughts (Studies 2 and 3). The meaningfulness attributed to specific dreams, however, was moderated by the extent to which the content of those dreams accorded with participant…
Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment
Artful paltering
Paltering is the active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression. Across 2 pilot studies and 6 experiments, we identify paltering as a distinct form of deception. Paltering differs from lying by omission (the passive omission of relevant information) and lying by commission (the active use of false statements). Our findings reveal that paltering is common in negotiations and that many negotiators prefer to palter than to lie b…
The Emergence of “Us and Them” in 80 Lines of Code
Psychological explanations of group genesis often require population heterogeneity in identity or other characteristics, whether deep (e.g., religion) or superficial (e.g., eye color). We used agent-based models to explore group genesis in homogeneous populations and found robust group formation with just two basic principles: reciprocity and transitivity. These emergent groups demonstrated in-group cooperation and out-group defection, even thoug…
Getting off the hedonic treadmill, one step at a time
Hype and Suspicion
We exposed some mock jurors to pretrial publicity (PTP) biased against the defendant a few days before they read the trial transcript and rendered individual verdicts. Exposure to the PTP prejudiced the jurors toward voting “guilty,” unless they read information within the PTP that indicated that the defendant was African American and that raised suspicion about the racist motives underlying the PTP's reporting. Information designed to raise more…
Vicarious dissonance
Three studies support the vicarious dissonance hypothesis that individuals change their attitudes when witnessing members of important groups engage in inconsistent behavior. Study 1, in which participants observed an actor in an induced-compliance paradigm, documented that students who identified with their college supported an issue more after hearing an ingroup member make a counterattitudinal speech in favor of that issue. In Study 2, vicario…
Reacting to an Assumed Situation vs. Conforming to an Assumed Reaction
Witnessing an ingroup member acting against his or her belief can lead individuals who identify with that group to change their own attitude in the direction of that counterattitudinal behavior. Two studies demonstrate this vicarious dissonance effect among high ingroup identifiers and show that this attitude change is not attributable to conformity to a perceived change in speaker attitude. Study 1 shows that the effect occurs-indeed, is stronge…
Conquests of Chocolate
Chocolate—along with tomatoes, potatoes, maize, and tobacco— originated in the Americas. How did chocolate make its way to Europeans and Europe? One might think that Europeans knew a good thing when they saw it, and immediately began exporting chocolate to savor in the “Old World.” Or maybe Europeans found chocolate overly bitter and strange-tasting and so thought to sweeten it with sugar and Old World spices and make it “European.” Both of these…
From student to superhero
Spin (and Pitch) Doctors
Casuistry and Social Category Bias
This research explored cases where people are drawn to make judgments between individuals based on questionable criteria, in particular those individuals' social group memberships. We suggest that individuals engage in casuistry to mask biased decision making, by recruiting more acceptable criteria to justify such decisions. We present 6 studies that demonstrate how casuistry licenses people to judge on the basis of social category information bu…
This Old Stereotype
Americans stereotype elderly people as warm and incompetent, following from perceptions of them as noncompetitive and low status, respectively. This article extends existing research regarding stereotyping of older people in two ways. First, we discuss whether the mixed elderly stereotype is unique to American culture. Data from six non‐U.S. countries, including three collectivist cultures, demonstrate elderly stereotypes are consistent across va…
Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction
Two experiments explored the ramifications of endorsing color blindness as a strategy for appearing unprejudiced. In Study 1, Whites proved adept at categorizing faces on the basis of race, but understated their ability to do so. In Study 2, Whites playing the Political Correctness Game—a matching task that requires describing other individuals—were less likely to use race as a descriptor when paired with a Black partner than when paired with a W…
Lay Theories About White Racists
Psychological theories of racial bias assume a pervasive motivation to avoid appearing racist, yet researchers know little regarding laypeople's theories about what constitutes racism. By investigating lay theories of White racism across both college and community samples, we seek to develop a more complete understanding of the nature of race-related norms, motivations, and processes of social perception in the contemporary United States. Factor …
Mixed motives and racial bias
Recent high-profile court rulings addressing the influence of illegitimate information--such as race--on decision making have highlighted the difficulty of establishing whether and when discrimination has occurred. One factor complicating such efforts is that decision makers are often simultaneously influenced by racial and nonracial information. The authors examined the psychological processes underlying such mixed-motive decision making, demons…
Wandering Minds
Despite evidence pointing to a ubiquitous tendency of human minds to wander, little is known about the neural operations that support this core component of human cognition. Using both thought sampling and brain imaging, the current investigation demonstrated that mind-wandering is associated with activity in a default network of cortical regions that are active when the brain is “at rest.” In addition, individuals' reports of the tendency of the…
Aid in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
This research examines inferences about the emotional states of ingroup and outgroup victims after a natural disaster, and whether these inferences predict intergroup helping. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the southern United States, White and non-White participants were asked to infer the emotional states of an individualized Black or White victim, and were asked to report their intentions to help such victims. Overall, participants b…
Bias in jury selection
The United States Supreme Court has restricted attorneys from considering the gender and race of potential jurors in their use of peremptory challenges—the practice by which jurors may be removed from a jury without explanation or evidence of potential bias. We propose that forbidding peremptories based on social category information not only fails to decrease biased jury selection, but also encourages attorneys to search—successfully—for neutral…
Less is more
The present research shows that although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking. Thus, ambiguity--lacking information about another--leads to liking, whereas familiarity--acquiring more information--can breed contempt. This "less is more" effect is due to the cascading nature of dissimilarity: Once evidence of dissimilarity is encountered, subsequent …
Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness
Although much research has examined the effect of income on happiness, we suggest that how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. Specifically, we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, we found that spending more of one's income on others predicted greater happiness …
The downside of feeling better
View retraction statement:Statement of Retraction
Getting off the hedonic treadmill, one step at a time
Learning (not) to talk about race
Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development
Race and jury selection
The legal system is a domain of potential relevance for psychologists, whether in the capacity of expert witness or citizen juror. In this article, the authors apply a psychological framework to legal debate surrounding the impact of race on the process of jury selection. More specifically, the authors consider race and the peremptory challenge, the procedure by which attorneys may remove prospective jurors without explanation. This debate is add…
Seeing race and seeming racist? Evaluating strategic colorblindness in social interaction
One strategy practiced by many Whites to regulate the appearance of prejudice during social interaction is to avoid talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference. Four experiments involving a dyadic task investigated antecedents and consequences of this tendency. However, this tendency was often counterproductive, as avoiding race during interracial interaction predicted negative nonverbal behavior (Study 1), a relationship mediated…
When dreaming is believing
This research investigated laypeople's interpretation of their dreams. Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar waking thoughts (Studies 2 and 3). The meaningfulness attributed to specific dreams, however, was moderated by the extent to which the content of those dreams accorded with participant…
From Wealth to Well-Being? Money Matters, but Less than People Think
Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing
Although some have heralded recent political and cultural developments as signaling the arrival of a postracial era in America, several legal and social controversies regarding “reverse racism” highlight Whites’ increasing concern about anti-White bias. We show that this emerging belief reflects Whites’ view of racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in perceived bias against Blacks over the past six decades are associated with increases i…
Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing
Psychology (63 works) · Social Psychology (57 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (26 works) · Social Psychology (22 works) · Economics (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (17 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Perception (14 works)