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In everyday life, this context sensitivity usually serves people well because only context-sensitive evaluation can guide behavior in adaptive ways by alerting people to problems and opportunities when they exist, interrupting ongoing processes when needed (but not otherwise), and rendering information that is relevant “now” and in the given context highly accessible. Thus, judgment and decision making should privilege information that is relevant to the present context, outweigh recent experience and experience from similar situations, and take current goals and concerns into account. A large body of diverse findings indicates that human cognition meets these needs, from the context-sensitive accessibility of relevant information to the context-sensitive activation and enactment of goals and the motivational influences that Avnet and Higgins address.

However, the same processes result in surprising and “funny” effects when experimental procedures engage them in the absence of conditions under which they can plausibly serve adaptive functions. The apparent haphazardness of the influence is often derived from the need for experimental control, which is met by engaging the process in a context that would otherwise not give rise to it. In combination with psychologists’ preference for counterintuitive illustrations, this research strategy results in the recent proliferation of funny and apparently irrational effects that marketing researchers sometimes find disturbing. From a more benevolent perspective, however, it is remarkable how well human cognition is tuned to meet the requirements of current concerns and situations.  

Biography
Norbert Schwarz is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, and Research Professor in the Survey Research Center and Research Center for Group Dynamics of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. He received his doctoral degree in Sociology and Psychology from the University of Mannheim, Germany (1980). Before joining the University of Michigan in 1993, he taught psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (1981–1992) and served as Scientific Director of ZUMA, an interdisciplinary social science research center in Mannheim (1987–1992). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Psychological Society, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. His research interests focus on human judgment and cognition, including the interplay of feeling and thinking; the socially situated nature of cognition; and the implications of basic cognitive and communicative processes for public opinion, consumer behavior, and social science research.

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