Publications

Darley, J. M. & Alter, A. L. (in press). Behavioral issues of punishment and deterrence. In E. Shafir (Ed.), Behavioral foundations of policy.
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Oppenheimer, D. M., & Alter, A. L. (in press) "The Fluency sleeper effect: Disfluency endured today promotes fluency tomorrow.". In: R. Greifeneder & C. Unkelbach "Advances in Fluency and Metacognition" Psychology Press.
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Alter, A.L. (in press). The benefits of cognitive disfluency. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Sussman, A. B., & Alter, A. L. (2012). The exception is the rule: Underestimating and overspending on exceptional expenses. Journal of Consumer Research.

Sharma, E., & Alter, A. L. (2012). Financial deprivation prompts consumers to seek scarce goods. Journal of Consumer Research.

Laham, S., Koval, P., & Alter, A. L. (2012). The name pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Alter, A. L., & Balcetis, E. (2011). Fondness makes the distance grow shorter: Desired locations seem closer because they are more vivid. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 16-21.

Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Zemla, J. C. (2010). Missing the trees for the forest: A construal theory account of the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 436-451.
• Runner-Up, 2010 Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award, Society of Judgment and Decision Making.

Alter, A. L., Aronson, J., Darley, J. M., Rodriguez, C., & Ruble, D. N. (2010). Rising to the threat: Reducing stereotype threat by reframing the threat as a challenge. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 166-161.

Alter, A. L., & Darley, J. M. (2009). When the association between appearance and outcome contaminates social judgment: A bidirectional model linking group homogeneity and collective treatment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 776-795.

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Suppressing secrecy through metacognitive ease: Cognitive fluency encourages self-disclosure. Psychological Science, 20, 1414-1420.

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13, 219-235.

Laham, S., Alter, A. L., & Goodwin, G. P. (2009). Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: Unexpectedly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong. Cognition, 112, 462-466.

Alter, A. L., & Kwan, V. S. Y. (2009). Cultural sharing in a global village: Extracultural cognition in European Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 742-760.

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). Easy on the mind, easy on the wallet: Effects of fluency on valuation judgments. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 15, 985-990.
• Subject of a feature article on Irrational Economics in The Economist, April 3, 2008.

Alter, A. L. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). Effects of fluency on psychological distance and mental construal (or why New York is a large city, but New York is a civilized jungle). Psychological Science, 19, 161-167.

Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., Epley, N, & Eyre, R. N. (2007). Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 569-576.

Alter, A. L. & Forgas, J. P. (2007). On feeling happy but fearing failure: The effects of mood on selfhandicapping strategies. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 947-954.

Alter, A. L., Kernochan, J., & Darley, J. M. (2007). Morality influences how people apply the ignorance of the law defense. Law and Society Review, 41, 819-864.

Alter, A. L., Kernochan, J., & Darley, J. M. (2007). Transgression wrongfulness outweighs its harmfulness as a determinant of sentence severity. Law and Human Behavior, 31, 319-335.

Alter, A. L. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). From a fixation on sports to an exploration of mechanism: The past, present and future of hot hand research. Thinking and Reasoning, 12, 431-444.

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 9369-9372.
• Selected as a PNAS: In This Week feature article.
• Paper featured in Nature news, May 30th 2006.
• Interviewed on U.S. and Australian television and British radio, and research featured in international newspapers and popular journals, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian (United Kingdom).