Nicholas Epley
Biographic Data
| ID | 226812 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas Epley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Epley |
| SIGNATURE | EPLEY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2722-9799 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 601 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Fleeting generalization: How unstable belief updating keeps people overly pessimistic about talking to strangers
Conversations with strangers and weak ties tend to be positive experiences, and yet research suggests a reliable tendency to hold overly pessimistic expectations about such conversations. We examine how people update their beliefs after talking with strangers to understand how people's miscalibrated social expectations could persist even in the presence of more positive social experiences. In three longitudinal experiments, having a conversation …
Let it go: How exaggerating the reputational costs of revealing negative information encourages secrecy in relationships
Keeping negative interpersonal secrets can diminish well-being, yet people nevertheless keep negative information secret from friends, family, and loved ones to protect their own reputations. Twelve experiments suggest these reputational concerns are systematically miscalibrated, creating a misplaced barrier to honesty in relationships. In hypothetical scenarios (Experiments 1, S1, and S2), laboratory experiments (Experiments 2 and 6), and field …
Overly shallow: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation
People may want deep and meaningful relationships with others, but may also be reluctant to engage in the deep and meaningful conversations with strangers that could create those relationships. We hypothesized that people systematically underestimate how caring and interested distant strangers are in one's own intimate revelations and that these miscalibrated expectations create a psychological barrier to deeper conversations. As predicted, conve…
Insufficiently complimentary: Underestimating the positive impact of compliments creates a barrier to expressing them
Compliments increase the well-being of both expressers and recipients, yet in a series of surveys people report giving fewer compliments than they should give, or would like to give. Nine experiments suggest that a reluctance to express genuine compliments partly stems from underestimating the positive impact that compliments will have on recipients. Participants wrote genuine compliments and then predicted how happy and awkward those compliments…
Kind words do not become tired words: Undervaluing the positive impact of frequent compliments
Compliments can satisfy others’ need to belong, but expressers may underestimate their positive impact on recipients, creating a barrier to giving them more often. We assess how people expect recipients will react to multiple compliments over time, compared to recipients’ actual experiences. Participants expected that recipients would adopt to multiple compliments, with each feeling less positive and sincere (Experiment 1). An experiment found no…
Demeaning: Dehumanizing others by minimizing the importance of their psychological needs
We document a tendency to demean others' needs: believing that psychological needs-those requiring mental capacity, and hence more uniquely human (e.g., need for meaning and autonomy)-are relatively less important to others compared with physical needs-those shared with other biological agents, and hence more animalistic (e.g., need for food and sleep). Because valuing psychological needs requires a sophisticated humanlike mind, agents presumed t…
Escalation of negative social exchange: Reflexive punishment or deliberative deterrence
Perspective mistaking: Accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective
Taking another person's perspective is widely presumed to increase interpersonal understanding. Very few experiments, however, have actually tested whether perspective taking increases accuracy when predicting another person's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or other mental states. Those that do yield inconsistent results, or they confound accuracy with egocentrism. Here we report 25 experiments testing whether being instructed to adopt another pe…
Maybe holier, but definitely less evil, than you: Bounded self-righteousness in social judgment
Few biases in human judgment are easier to demonstrate than self-righteousness: the tendency to believe one is more moral than others. Existing research, however, has overlooked an important ambiguity in evaluations of one's own and others' moral behavior that could lead to an overly simplistic characterization of self-righteousness. In particular, moral behavior spans a broad spectrum ranging from doing good to doing bad. Self-righteousness coul…
The Mechanics of Motivated Reasoning
Whenever we see voters explain away their preferred candidate's weaknesses, dieters assert that a couple scoops of ice cream won't really hurt their weight loss goals, or parents maintain that their children are unusually gifted, we are reminded that people's preferences can affect their beliefs. This idea is captured in the common saying, "People believe what they want to believe." But people don't simply believe what they want to believe. Psych…
Mistakenly seeking solitude.
Connecting with others increases happiness, but strangers in close proximity routinely ignore each other. Why? Two reasons seem likely: Either solitude is a more positive experience than interacting with strangers, or people misunderstand the consequences of distant social connections. To examine the experience of connecting to strangers, we instructed commuters on trains and buses to connect with a stranger near them, to remain disconnected, or …
Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Asymmetric Consequences of Breaking Versus Exceeding Promises
Promises are social contracts that can be broken, kept, or exceeded. Breaking one’s promise is evaluated more negatively than keeping one’s promise. Does expending more effort to exceed a promise lead to equivalently more positive evaluations? Although linear in their outcomes, we expected an asymmetry in evaluations of broken, kept, and exceeded promises. Whereas breaking one’s promise is obviously negative compared to keeping a promise, we pred…
The mind in the machine: Anthropomorphism increases trust in an autonomous vehicle
Social connection enables dehumanization
Mind Perception
14.1 Mind Perception Versus Person Perception 14.2 Why Mind? 14.3 Activating Mind Perception 14.4 Acquiring Mind Perception 14.5 Using Mind Perception 14.6 Targets of Mind Perception 14.7 Consequences of Mind Perception 14.8 Conclusion
Social Cognition Unbound: Insights Into Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization
People conceive of wrathful gods, fickle computers, and selfish genes, attributing human characteristics to a variety of supernatural, technological, and biological agents. This tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents figures prominently in domains ranging from religion to marketing to computer science. Perceiving an agent to be humanlike has important implications for whether the agent is capable of social influence, accountable for its act…
Causes and consequences of mind perception
Who Sees Human?: The Stability and Importance of Individual Differences in Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is a far-reaching phenomenon that incorporates ideas from social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the neurosciences. Although commonly considered to be a relatively universal phenomenon with only limited importance in modern industrialized societies—more cute than critical—our research suggests precisely the opposite. In particular, we provide a measure of stable individual differences in anthropomo…
Reflexively mindblind: Using theory of mind to interpret behavior requires effortful attention
The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers
Making sense by making sentient: Effectance motivation increases anthropomorphism
People commonly anthropomorphize nonhuman agents, imbuing everything from computers to pets to gods with humanlike capacities and mental experiences. Although widely observed, the determinants of anthropomorphism are poorly understood and rarely investigated. We propose that people anthropomorphize, in part, to satisfy effectance motivation-the basic and chronic motivation to attain mastery of one's environment. Five studies demonstrated that inc…
Self-centered social exchange: Differential use of costs versus benefits in prosocial reciprocity
Maintaining equitable social relations often requires reciprocating "in kind" for others' prosocial favors. Such in-kind reciprocity requires assessing the value of a prosocial action, an assessment that can lead to egocentric biases in perceived value between favor givers versus favor receivers. In any prosocial exchange, 1 person (the giver) incurs a cost to provide a benefit for another person (the receiver). Six experiments suggest that giver…
Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction: Loneliness and Perceived Agency in Gadgets, Gods, and Greyhounds
People are motivated to maintain social connection with others, and those who lack social connection with other humans may try to compensate by creating a sense of human connection with nonhuman agents. This may occur in at least two ways—by anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as nonhuman animals and gadgets to make them appear more humanlike and by increasing belief in commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God). Three studies …
When We Need A Human: Motivational Determinants of Anthropomorphism
We propose that the tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents is determined primarily by three factors (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007), two of which we test here: sociality motivation and effectance motivation. This theory makes unique predictions about dispositional, situational, cultural, and developmental variability in anthropomorphism, and we test two predictions about dispositional and situational influences stemming from both of these …
In the mood to get over yourself: Mood affects theory-of-mind use
Understanding others' behavior often involves attributing mental states to them by using one's "theory of mind." We argue that using theory of mind to recognize differences between one's own perspective and another's perspective is a deliberate process of inference that may be influenced by incidental mood. Because sadness is associated with more systematic and deliberate processing whereas happiness is associated with more heuristic processing, …
Perspective Taking as Egocentric Anchoring and Adjustment
The authors propose that people adopt others' perspectives by serially adjusting from their own. As predicted, estimates of others' perceptions were consistent with one's own but differed in a manner consistent with serial adjustment (Study 1). Participants were slower to indicate that another's perception would be different from--rather than similar to--their own (Study 2). Egocentric biases increased under time pressure (Study 2) and decreased …
The mind in the machine: Anthropomorphism increases trust in an autonomous vehicle
"Feeling "holier than thou: Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction
People typically believe they are more likely to engage in selfless, kind, and generous behaviors than their peers, a result that is both logically and statistically suspect. However, this oft-documented tendency presents an important ambiguity. Do people feel "holier than thou" because they harbor overly cynical views of their peers (but accurate impressions of themselves) or overly charitable views of themselves (and accurate impressions of the…
The Mechanics of Motivated Reasoning
Whenever we see voters explain away their preferred candidate's weaknesses, dieters assert that a couple scoops of ice cream won't really hurt their weight loss goals, or parents maintain that their children are unusually gifted, we are reminded that people's preferences can affect their beliefs. This idea is captured in the common saying, "People believe what they want to believe." But people don't simply believe what they want to believe. Psych…
Making sense by making sentient: Effectance motivation increases anthropomorphism
People commonly anthropomorphize nonhuman agents, imbuing everything from computers to pets to gods with humanlike capacities and mental experiences. Although widely observed, the determinants of anthropomorphism are poorly understood and rarely investigated. We propose that people anthropomorphize, in part, to satisfy effectance motivation-the basic and chronic motivation to attain mastery of one's environment. Five studies demonstrated that inc…
When perspective taking increases taking: Reactive egoism in social interaction
Group members often reason egocentrically, believing that they deserve more than their fair share of group resources. Leading people to consider other members' thoughts and perspectives can reduce these egocentric (self-centered) judgments such that people claim that it is fair for them to take less; however, the consideration of others' thoughts and perspectives actually increases egoistic (selfish) behavior such that people actually take more o…
Social connection enables dehumanization
Reflexively mindblind: Using theory of mind to interpret behavior requires effortful attention
Egocentrism over e-mail: Can we communicate as well as we think
Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficu…
Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations
Perspective mistaking: Accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective
Taking another person's perspective is widely presumed to increase interpersonal understanding. Very few experiments, however, have actually tested whether perspective taking increases accuracy when predicting another person's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or other mental states. Those that do yield inconsistent results, or they confound accuracy with egocentrism. Here we report 25 experiments testing whether being instructed to adopt another pe…
Just Going Along: Nonconscious Priming and Conformity to Social Pressure
Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps
The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers
Bonus of rebate: The impact of income framing on spending and saving
All income increases a person's absolute wealth, but consumption decisions may be based more heavily on perceived changes in wealth. Change is computed by comparing a current state with a former state, and we predicted that people would be more likely to spend income framed as a gain from a current wealth state than income framed as a return to a prior state. Four experiments confirmed this prediction on people's memory for spending of a governme…
Egocentric Ethics
Unfixed Resources: Perceived Costs, Consumption, and the Accessible Account Effect
Consumption depletes one's available resources, but consumers may be unaware of the total resources available for consumption and, therefore, be influenced by the temporary accessibility of resource accounts. Consistent with this possibility, consumers in four experiments perceived a unit of consumption to be smaller and consequently consumed more, when large resource accounts of money, calories, or time (e.g., the money in their savings account)…
When effortful thinking influences judgmental anchoring: Differential effects of forewarning and incentives on self-generated and externally provided anchors
Two experiments examined the impact of financial incentives and forewarnings on judgmental anchoring effects, or the tendency for judgments of uncertain qualities to be biased in the direction of salient anchor values. Previous research has found no effect of either manipulation on the magnitude of anchoring effects. We argue, however, that anchoring effects are produced by multiple mechanisms—one involving an effortful process of adjustment from…
The unpacking effect in evaluative judgments: When the whole is less than the sum of its parts
The unpacking effect in allocations of responsibility for group tasks
Overly shallow: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation
People may want deep and meaningful relationships with others, but may also be reluctant to engage in the deep and meaningful conversations with strangers that could create those relationships. We hypothesized that people systematically underestimate how caring and interested distant strangers are in one's own intimate revelations and that these miscalibrated expectations create a psychological barrier to deeper conversations. As predicted, conve…
Demeaning: Dehumanizing others by minimizing the importance of their psychological needs
We document a tendency to demean others' needs: believing that psychological needs-those requiring mental capacity, and hence more uniquely human (e.g., need for meaning and autonomy)-are relatively less important to others compared with physical needs-those shared with other biological agents, and hence more animalistic (e.g., need for food and sleep). Because valuing psychological needs requires a sophisticated humanlike mind, agents presumed t…
When what you type isn’t what they read: The perseverance of stereotypes and expectancies over e-mail
Maybe holier, but definitely less evil, than you: Bounded self-righteousness in social judgment
Few biases in human judgment are easier to demonstrate than self-righteousness: the tendency to believe one is more moral than others. Existing research, however, has overlooked an important ambiguity in evaluations of one's own and others' moral behavior that could lead to an overly simplistic characterization of self-righteousness. In particular, moral behavior spans a broad spectrum ranging from doing good to doing bad. Self-righteousness coul…
The costs and benefits of undoing egocentric responsibility assessments in groups
Individuals working in groups often egocentrically believe they have contributed more of the total work than is logically possible. Actively considering others' contributions effectively reduces these egocentric assessments, but this research suggests that undoing egocentric biases in groups may have some unexpected costs. Four experiments demonstrate that members who contributed much to the group outcome are actually less satisfied and less inte…
Just Going Along: Nonconscious Priming and Conformity to Social Pressure
"Feeling "holier than thou: Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction
People typically believe they are more likely to engage in selfless, kind, and generous behaviors than their peers, a result that is both logically and statistically suspect. However, this oft-documented tendency presents an important ambiguity. Do people feel "holier than thou" because they harbor overly cynical views of their peers (but accurate impressions of themselves) or overly charitable views of themselves (and accurate impressions of the…
Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: Differential Processing of Self-Generated and Experimenter-Provided Anchors
People's estimates of uncertain quantities are commonly influenced by irrelevant values. These anchoring effects were originally explained as insufficient adjustment away from an initial anchor value. The existing literature provides little support for the postulated process of adjustment, however, and a consensus that none takes place seems to be emerging. We argue that this conclusion is premature, and we present evidence that insufficient adju…
Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps
Empathy neglect: Reconciling the spotlight effect and the correspondence bias
When people commit an embarrassing blunder, they typically overestimate how harshly they will be judged by others. This tendency can seem to fly in the face of research on the correspondence bias, which has established that observers are, in fact, quite likely to draw harsh dispositional inferences about others. These seemingly inconsistent literatures are reconciled by showing that actors typically neglect to consider the extent to which observe…
The unpacking effect in evaluative judgments: When the whole is less than the sum of its parts
The unpacking effect in allocations of responsibility for group tasks
When what you type isn’t what they read: The perseverance of stereotypes and expectancies over e-mail
Perspective Taking as Egocentric Anchoring and Adjustment
The authors propose that people adopt others' perspectives by serially adjusting from their own. As predicted, estimates of others' perceptions were consistent with one's own but differed in a manner consistent with serial adjustment (Study 1). Participants were slower to indicate that another's perception would be different from--rather than similar to--their own (Study 2). Egocentric biases increased under time pressure (Study 2) and decreased …
Egocentric Ethics
When effortful thinking influences judgmental anchoring: Differential effects of forewarning and incentives on self-generated and externally provided anchors
Two experiments examined the impact of financial incentives and forewarnings on judgmental anchoring effects, or the tendency for judgments of uncertain qualities to be biased in the direction of salient anchor values. Previous research has found no effect of either manipulation on the magnitude of anchoring effects. We argue, however, that anchoring effects are produced by multiple mechanisms—one involving an effortful process of adjustment from…
Egocentrism over e-mail: Can we communicate as well as we think
Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficu…
The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic: Why the Adjustments Are Insufficient
One way to make judgments under uncertainty is to anchor on information that comes to mind and adjust until a plausible estimate is reached. This anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic is assumed to underlie many intuitive judgments, and insufficient adjustment is commonly invoked to explain judgmental biases. However, despite extensive research on anchoring effects, evidence for adjustment-based anchoring biases has only recently been provided, and …
Bonus of rebate: The impact of income framing on spending and saving
All income increases a person's absolute wealth, but consumption decisions may be based more heavily on perceived changes in wealth. Change is computed by comparing a current state with a former state, and we predicted that people would be more likely to spend income framed as a gain from a current wealth state than income framed as a return to a prior state. Four experiments confirmed this prediction on people's memory for spending of a governme…
When perspective taking increases taking: Reactive egoism in social interaction
Group members often reason egocentrically, believing that they deserve more than their fair share of group resources. Leading people to consider other members' thoughts and perspectives can reduce these egocentric (self-centered) judgments such that people claim that it is fair for them to take less; however, the consideration of others' thoughts and perspectives actually increases egoistic (selfish) behavior such that people actually take more o…
The costs and benefits of undoing egocentric responsibility assessments in groups
Individuals working in groups often egocentrically believe they have contributed more of the total work than is logically possible. Actively considering others' contributions effectively reduces these egocentric assessments, but this research suggests that undoing egocentric biases in groups may have some unexpected costs. Four experiments demonstrate that members who contributed much to the group outcome are actually less satisfied and less inte…
Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning.
Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency--receiving inform…
On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism.
Anthropomorphism describes the tendency to imbue the real or imagined behavior of nonhuman agents with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions, or emotions. Although surprisingly common, anthropomorphism is not invariant. This article describes a theory to explain when people are likely to anthropomorphize and when they are not, focused on three psychological determinants--the accessibility and applicability of anthropocentric knowledg…
Unfixed Resources: Perceived Costs, Consumption, and the Accessible Account Effect
Consumption depletes one's available resources, but consumers may be unaware of the total resources available for consumption and, therefore, be influenced by the temporary accessibility of resource accounts. Consistent with this possibility, consumers in four experiments perceived a unit of consumption to be smaller and consequently consumed more, when large resource accounts of money, calories, or time (e.g., the money in their savings account)…
Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction: Loneliness and Perceived Agency in Gadgets, Gods, and Greyhounds
People are motivated to maintain social connection with others, and those who lack social connection with other humans may try to compensate by creating a sense of human connection with nonhuman agents. This may occur in at least two ways—by anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as nonhuman animals and gadgets to make them appear more humanlike and by increasing belief in commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God). Three studies …
When We Need A Human: Motivational Determinants of Anthropomorphism
We propose that the tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents is determined primarily by three factors (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007), two of which we test here: sociality motivation and effectance motivation. This theory makes unique predictions about dispositional, situational, cultural, and developmental variability in anthropomorphism, and we test two predictions about dispositional and situational influences stemming from both of these …
In the mood to get over yourself: Mood affects theory-of-mind use
Understanding others' behavior often involves attributing mental states to them by using one's "theory of mind." We argue that using theory of mind to recognize differences between one's own perspective and another's perspective is a deliberate process of inference that may be influenced by incidental mood. Because sadness is associated with more systematic and deliberate processing whereas happiness is associated with more heuristic processing, …
Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations
Self-centered social exchange: Differential use of costs versus benefits in prosocial reciprocity
Maintaining equitable social relations often requires reciprocating "in kind" for others' prosocial favors. Such in-kind reciprocity requires assessing the value of a prosocial action, an assessment that can lead to egocentric biases in perceived value between favor givers versus favor receivers. In any prosocial exchange, 1 person (the giver) incurs a cost to provide a benefit for another person (the receiver). Six experiments suggest that giver…
Mind Perception
14.1 Mind Perception Versus Person Perception 14.2 Why Mind? 14.3 Activating Mind Perception 14.4 Acquiring Mind Perception 14.5 Using Mind Perception 14.6 Targets of Mind Perception 14.7 Consequences of Mind Perception 14.8 Conclusion
Psychology (44 works) · Social Psychology (42 works) · Cognitive psychology (24 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (21 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (19 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (12 works) · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion (12 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works)