Consumers are exposed to large amounts of advertising every day. One way to avoid being manipulated is to monitor the sources of persuasive messages. In the present study it was tested whether high exposure to advertising affects the memory and guessing processes underlying source attributions. Participants were exposed to high or low proportions…

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as…

People consider alternative causes when deciding whether a cause is responsible for an effect (diagnostic inference) but appear to neglect them when deciding whether an effect will occur (predictive inference). Five experiments were conducted to test a 2-part explanation of this phenomenon: namely, (a) that people interpret standard predictive…

Previous research in social cognition has established that "top of the head" processing is a robust inferential bias, even in engrossing task situations. Three experiments were conducted to examine the generalizability of perceptual salience effects. In each experiment, salience was manipulated by varying the visual prominence of…

Social theories (beliefs about relationships between variables in the social environment) are often used in making judgments, predictions, or decisions. Three experiments on the role of explanation processes in the development and use of social theories were conducted. The first experiment assessed the effects of explaining a hypothetical…