{"pk":25677,"title":"Near-misses sting even when they are uncontrollable","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Observers often judge agents who miss a desired outcome by a\nsmall, compared to a large, margin to be less happy. This nearmiss\neffect has typically been examined in situations where\nthe agents have control over outcomes (e.g., missing a flight).\nHere, we extend this work in three ways. First, we show\nthat near-miss effects play into observers’ intuitive theories of\nemotion even for randomly-determined outcomes over which\nagents demonstrably have no control. Second, we find data\nconsistent with a hypothesis in which—even in randomly determined\ncases—near-miss effects reflect an illusion of control\nover those events. Finally, we integrate near-miss effects into a\nbroader model of affective cognition, and quantify the psychological\ncost of a missing a desired outcome by relatively little\ndistance, relative to winning or losing that outcome","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Near-Miss; Counterfactual Distance; Lay Theories;\nEmotion; Illusory Control"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99x3m02n","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Desmond","middle_name":"C","last_name":"Ong","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Jamil","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zaki","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25677/galley/15301/download/"}]}