Daniel T. Gilbert

Random procedures, such as coin flips, are used to settle disputes and allocate resources in a fair manner. Even though the outcome is random, we hypothesized that people would be sensitive to features of the process that make it seem unfair, that is, who gets to call heads or tails and flip the coin. In 11 studies (N = 5,925) participants competed against another participant for a positive or negative outcome, determined by a physical or virtual coin flip. The independent variable was who called heads or tails and flipped the coin: the participant or their opponent. When participants lost the flip, we found an illusion of unfairness: They reported that the process was less fair, were less pleased with their outcome, and found the other person less likable when their opponent flipped the coin. When participants won the flip, they thought it was less fair, and they felt guiltier when they had flipped the coin. We present evidence that these fairness judgments were based on both illusory procedural control (the person who flips the coin appears to have an unfair advantage by virtue of executing the flip before the outcome is known) and illusory outcome control (the belief that the flipper can influence the outcome of the flip). Further, the illusion of unfairness appears to be a quick, intuitive process that is not easily corrected. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on procedural justice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining^1,2. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources³, the underuse of social support⁴ and social influence⁵.

Oxytocin (OT) has been extensively studied with regard to its socio-cognitive and -behavioral effects. Its potential as a therapeutic agent is being discussed for a range of neuropsychiatric conditions. However, there is limited evidence of its effects on non-social cognition in general and decision-making in particular, despite the importance of these functions in neuropsychiatry. Using a crossover/within-subject, blinded, randomized design, we investigated for the first time if intranasal OT (24 IU) affects decision-making differently depending on outcome predictability/ambiguity in healthy males. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Cambridge Risk Task (CRT) were used to assess decision-making under low outcome predictability/high ambiguity and under high outcome probability/low ambiguity, respectively. After administration of OT, subjects performed worse and exhibited riskier performance in the IGT (low outcome predictability/high ambiguity), whereas they made borderline-significant less risky decisions in the CRT (high outcome probability/low ambiguity) as compared to the control condition. Decision-making in healthy males may therefore be influenced by OT and adjusted as a function of contextual information, with implications for clinical trials investigating OT in neuropsychiatric conditions.

Everyone knows that if you want to learn how to do something, you should get advice from people who do it well. But is everyone right? In a series of studies ( N = 8,693), adult participants played a game after receiving performance advice from previous participants. Although advice from the best-performing advisors was no more beneficial than advice from other advisors, participants believed that it had been—and they believed this despite the fact that they were told nothing about their advisors’ performance. Why? The best performers did not give better advice, but they did give more of it, and participants apparently mistook quantity for quality. These studies suggest that performing and advising may often be unrelated skills and that in at least some domains, people may overvalue advice from top performers.

We investigated intentional thinking for pleasure, defined as the deliberate attempt to have pleasant thoughts while disengaged from the external world. We propose a Trade-Off model that explains when and why thinking for pleasure is enjoyable: People focus on personally meaningful thoughts when thinking for pleasure (especially when prompted to do so), which increases their enjoyment, but they find it difficult to concentrate on their thoughts, which decreases their enjoyment. Thus, the net enjoyment of thinking for pleasure is a trade-off between its benefits (personal meaningfulness) and costs (difficulty concentrating). To test the model, we compared intentional thinking for pleasure to four alternate activities in three studies. Thinking for pleasure was more enjoyable than undirected thinking (Study 1) and planning (Study 3), because it was more meaningful than these activities while requiring a similar level of concentration. Thinking for pleasure was just as enjoyable as playing a video game (Study 2) or unprompted idle time activities (Study 3), but for different reasons: It was more meaningful than these activities, but required more concentration. We discuss the implications of these findings for what people might choose to do during idle times. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

When left to their own devices, people could choose to enjoy their own thoughts. But recent work suggests they do not. When given the freedom, people do not spontaneously choose to think for pleasure, and when directed to do so, struggle to concentrate successfully. Moreover, people find it somewhat boring and much less enjoyable than other solitary activities. One reason for this is that people may not know how to think for pleasure. Specifically, they may not know what to think about to make this both a meaningful and pleasant experience. We tested this prediction in two preregistered studies, by providing specific examples of meaningful topics (Study 1) or instructing participants to think "meaningful" thoughts (Study 2). Although providing specific examples of meaningful topics boosted how meaningful and enjoyable people found thinking for pleasure (Study 1), asking people to think "meaningful" thoughts (as compared with pleasurable ones) did not, because some of the meaningful topics people thought about were negative (Study 2). In order for thinking for pleasure to be pleasurable, people need to focus on topics that are both meaningful and positive.

Significance: Social connection is essential to physical and psychological well-being, and conversation is the primary means by which it is achieved. And yet, scientists know little about it—about how it starts, how it unfolds, or how it ends. Our studies attempted to remedy this deficit, and their results were surprising: conversations almost never end when anyone wants them to! At a moment in history when billions of people have been forced to curtail their normal social activities and to reimagine this one, a scientific understanding of conversation could hardly be timelier.

Perceptual and judgment creep: Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to “creep” when they ought not to. For example, when blue dots become rare, participants start calling purple dots blue, and when threatening faces become rare, participants start calling neutral faces threatening. This phenomenon has broad implications that may help explain why people whose job is to find and eliminate problems in the world often cannot tell when their work is done. Science , this issue p. 1465

People often tell each other stories about their past experiences. But do they tell the right ones? Speakers and listeners predicted that listeners would enjoy hearing novel stories (i.e., stories about experiences the listeners had never had) more than familiar stories (i.e., stories about experiences the listeners had already had). In fact, listeners enjoyed hearing familiar stories much more than novel ones (Studies 1 and 2). This did not happen because the familiar and novel stories differed in their content or delivery (Study 3). Rather, it happened because human speech is riddled with informational gaps, and familiar stories allow listeners to use their own knowledge to fill in those gaps (Study 4). We discuss reasons why novel stories are more difficult to tell, and why familiar stories are more enjoyable to hear, than either speakers or listeners expect.

A paper from the Open Science Collaboration (Research Articles, 28 August 2015, aac4716) attempting to replicate 100 published studies suggests that the reproducibility of psychological science is surprisingly low. We show that this article contains three statistical errors and provides no support for such a conclusion. Indeed, the data are consistent with the opposite conclusion, namely, that the reproducibility of psychological science is quite high.