How thinking about the other affects our reliance on cognitive feelings of ease and effort: Immediate discounting and delayed utilization

Past research shows that when people form judgments they rely not only on the content they access in memory but also on the ease with which this content is retrieved. The ease-of-retrieval (EOR) effect is an important marker for a class of phenomena in which people utilize metacognitive feelings in making judgments. Our investigation focuses on whether other people's involvement in the situation may be associated with a weakened EOR effect. We show that when concerns about other people's involvement were triggered in the context of self-judgments, the standard ease-ofretrieval effect disappeared (Experiments 1-3). Moreover, we hypothesize that thinking about others' motivations does not distract from encoding the ease of retrieval. Rather, it leads to the underutilization of this metacognitive information. Accordingly, we demonstrate that when EOR information is not manifested in an initial judgmental task it may be manifested in a later, seemingly unrelated, task (Experiments 3, 4).