Should political campaigns in close races communicate that they may win (over-confidence) or that they may lose (under-confidence)? In six studies (three survey experiments, two field experiments, and one archival study) we demonstrate the motivating power of under-confidence. While uncommitted...

This paper explores the psychology of conflict of interest by investigating how conflicting interests affect both public statements and private judgments. The results suggest that judgments are easily influenced by affiliation with interested partisans, and that this influence extends to...

Human ingenuity offers the best hope for tackling a whole range of environmental problems currently threatening global welfare, yet the human mind also creates cognitive barriers to wise environmental agreements. In this paper, we focus on a set of systematic cognitive barriers that are...

We present six studies demonstrating that outcome information biases ethical judgments of others' ethically-questionable behaviors. In particular, we show that the same behaviors produce more ethical condemnation when they happen to produce bad rather than good outcomes, even if the outcomes are...