Fleeting generalization: How unstable belief updating keeps people overly pessimistic about talking to strangers.

was unique to conversation (compared to a noninteractive control condition). It emerged both when a future conversation was with the same person and when it was with a different person, when people were explicitly asked to predict their experience before having it and when they were not, and across both relatively shallow and deeper conversations. Fleeting generalization stems partly (but not entirely) from recalling conversations as less positive than they felt immediately after having them. These findings suggest that miscalibrated social beliefs can persist even with unbiased experience to learn from. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).