Most explanations of social influence focus on why individuals might want to agree with the opinions or attitudes of others. The authors propose a different explanation that assumes the attitudes of others influence only the activities and objects individuals are exposed to. For example,...

Individuals tend to select again alternatives about which they have positive impressions and to avoid alternatives about which they have negative impressions. Here we show how this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process leads to the emergence of an illusory...

Individuals are typically more likely to repeatedly select alternatives they have a positive impression of. This paper shows that this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process might lead to the emergence of illusory correlation between attributes of multi-attribute...

Recent research has argued that several well-known judgment biases may be due to biases in the available information sample rather than to biased information processing. Most of these sample-based explanations assume that decision makers are “naive”: They are not aware of the biases in the...