Even when we are not faced with any decision, we sometimesengage in offline cognition where we simulate various possi-ble actions we can take. In these instances, which options dowe tend to simulate? Computational models have suggestedthat it is better to focus our limited cognitive resources to-wards simulating and refining our representations of optionsthat appear, at first blush, to have higher values. Two exper-imental studies explore whether we use this strategy. Partic-ipants went through an ‘offline’ thinking phase, and an ‘on-line’ decision-making phase. Participants first freely viewedvarious options, which they had to simulate to determine theiractual values. They were later asked to decide between goodor bad options. Offline simulation produced faster online re-sponse times for the options that appeared to have highervalues, indicating a pre-computation benefit for these items.These results suggest that people focus their offline cognitionon the apparently good.

How do we represent other people? Our representations are prone to a wide range of biases. We project our mental states onto others (especially when we assume they are similar to us), or rely on existing stereotypes (when we think they are different). But sometimes, it can be unclear how similar or different a person actually is from us. How does this affect how we represent their preferences? Here, subjects declared their favorite and least favorite colors and were introduced to another person whose preferences were neither completely similar or dissimilar. Across experiments, people successfully remembered the other person’s preferences, but they also tended to falsely ascribe their own lower ranked preferences to the other player in multiple memory and decision-making tasks. These results suggest a tendency to distance ourselves from preferences we identify with the least in our hierarchy of preferences, and to associate them instead with the ''other''.