In one experiment, college students were asked two questions: (a) How happy are you? (b) How often are you dating? When the two questions were asked in this order, the correlation between the two questions was quite low (.11). But when the question order was reversed, so that the dating question was asked first, the correlation jumped to .62. Apparently, when prompted by the dating question, the students use what might be called the “dating heuristic” to answer the question about how happy they are. “Gee, I can’t remember when I last had a date! I must be miserable.” Similar results can be
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