Dive into Drunk Tank Pink Today!

NYU professor Adam Alter’s new book, Drunk Tank Pink, is out today! As I mentioned in a post last week, we are trying out a new feature here at The Situationist of interviewing authors about their books and we’ll be publishing the interview with Adam in a few days. In anticipation of that, here is one of Adam’s interesting recent papers, Fondness makes the distance grow shorter: Desired locations seem closer because they seem more vivid: Do appealing locations seem nearer than unappealing locations merely because they are more desirable? We examine the possibility that people represent desirable locations as nearer than equidistant undesirable locations. In three studies, participants represented a variety of locations on a university campus (Study 1) and in the greater New York City area (Studies 2 and 3) as nearer the more positive they felt about those locations. The relationship between positivity and closeness was mediated by the tendency for participants to generate particularly vivid representations of the locations when they evaluated them more positively (Studies 2 and 3). We discuss the theoretical implications of these results for mental construal, motivated perception and metacognition.
Source: The Situationist - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs