Studies (page 18)

Ott and colleagues challenge the conclusion of the cross-species sunk cost study on statistical grounds. Their argument is a form of attrition bias. In a task where subjects can quit at any moment…

Payne and colleagues set out to show that priming effects can be obtained reliably when the experiment is designed differently. Rather than comparing groups of people, they used a procedure in which…

Pecina, Cagniard, Berridge, Aldridge and Zhuang used a genetic mutant approach to ask what dopamine does in natural reward. A dopamine transporter knockdown mutation preserving only a tenth of…

Pecina and Berridge set out to find where in the brain pleasure is actually amplified, rather than where reward-related activity appears. Working in rats, they injected an opioid drug at many…

Study 1, 231 University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduates, all buyers, Slinky and mug; valuation $3.38 touch against $2.73 no touch (no imagery); without touch, imagery raised valuation from $2.73…

Four longitudinal studies with 1,035 participants by J. Peetz and colleagues. People who shared a goal reported more support from others, and in most studies that support was linked to greater…

Peperkoorn, Roberts and Pollet present three studies whose results did not support the prediction, drawn from colour-in-context theory, that red clothing raises attractiveness ratings. The work was…

Pettibone tested a prediction from dynamic, connectionist models of decision making such as decision field theory, in which context effects arise from a series of pairwise comparisons between…

Richard Pew's profile of Alphonse Chapanis in the APS Observer describes how Chapanis noticed that the landing flaps and landing gear on some wartime bombers had identical switches placed side by…

Philpot and colleagues point out that fifty years of bystander research answered a question about individuals, whether any one person is less likely to help when others are present, and left the…

Piqueras-Fiszman, Giboreau and Spence tested plate colour where it matters, in a working restaurant, with complex food and diners who had come out to eat. Earlier studies had shown that identical…

20 subjects (11 male, ages 21 to 30), screened for liking red wine; three wines presented as five, wine 1 at $5 and $45, wine 2 at $10 and $90, wine 3 at $35; pleasantness differed by price for both…

Platts, Seddigh, Berntson and Westerlund tested a claim that had rested largely on self-report. Earlier research associating open-plan offices with higher sickness absence depended on people…

Controls for subject misconceptions combined (anonymity, incentive-compatible elicitation, practice and training, modified Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism); experiments with lotteries and mugs…

No exchange asymmetries under modified procedures; asymmetries reappear with traditional-type procedures.

All mug data reject endowment effect theory; lottery gaps associated with unstable attitudes toward uncertainty; lottery outcome beliefs influenced by whether WTP or WTA is reported.

Pollet, Roberts and Dunbar examine how extraversion relates to the size of the different layers of a social network, and to the emotional intensity of the relationships inside them, across 117…

This is the live music industry's own year-end analysis, cited for a pattern rather than a headline. For 2025 it reported that total grosses and ticket sales fell while average prices rose, with…

Powers and colleagues examined whether perfectionism helps or hinders people in reaching their goals, across five studies covering several life domains. The literature had been unsettled because…

Pain of paying, taxi meter example, coupling (credit cards weaken it, cash produces tight coupling), flat-rate preference; model fitted better for 60 per cent of subjects against 29 per cent for…