334 Understanding Emotional Decision Making
attitudes and team dynamics.^266 Groups experiencing positive emotional contagion show improved
cooperation, decreased confl ict, and increased perceived performance.^267 Conversely, groups expe-
riencing negative group emotions are less likely to cooperate and more likely to miss work.^268
Biases in Emotional Decision Making
The Effects of Incidental Moods and Emotions on Audience Decisions
Moods and emotions triggered by events pertinent to a decision, or integral moods and emotions,
generally have a stronger infl uence on audience decisions than incidental moods and emotions, or
ones triggered by unrelated events.^269 For example, the integral fear an investor feels after a sud-
den drop in stock prices will generally have a stronger effect on her investment decisions than the
incidental fear she feels after being startled by a sudden loud noise. But because people cannot
distinguish clearly between the integral emotion actually elicited by an event and the incidental
ones they happen to be experiencing for other, unrelated reasons, incidental moods and emotions
can infl uence their decisions as well. For example, traders in the fi nancial markets trade differently
when the music they listen to changes their mood. When the music puts them into a good mood,
traders tend to be overconfi dent and make less profi table trades than normal. When the music puts
them into a bad mood, on the other hand, they tend to be more conservative and to make more
profi table decisions.^270
A wide range of events unrelated to the decision to be made have been shown to affect audienceemotions and infl uence their decisions, events such as the weather, receiving a small gift, and remi-
niscing about a happy or sad past experience.^271 Even the upbeat or depressed color of the paper on
which information is printed can trigger a shift in mood and infl uence the audience’s decision.^272
Once a mood or emotion is triggered, it and its action tendency will linger after the trigger-ing event has passed if the audience does not take the emotion-relieving action.^273 In such cases
the action tendencies triggered by one situation bias the audience’s assessment of unrelated situa-
tions.^274 In a study of the effects of incidental emotions on audience decision making, one group
of viewers watched a fi lm in which a violent criminal was punished and a second group watched
another fi lm in which the criminal evaded punishment due to a legal technicality. Both groups
reported equivalent levels of anger in response to the crime. Soon afterward, the two groups were
asked to read a legal case about a different crime and to recommend an appropriate punishment for
the perpetrator. Because the incidental anger felt by the second group went unrelieved, the second
group handed down harsher sentences.^275
Other studies confi rm that incidental moods and emotions can bias the audience’s action ten-dencies. Readers whose anger was fi rst aroused by a story about toxic waste dumping were later
more likely to decide to punish the perpetrator of an unrelated incident than to help the victims of
that incident.^276 In a study that fi rst primed either anger or fear in two groups of participants, each
group was subsequently asked how they might reduce the problem of drunk driving. Sixty-fi ve
percent of the fear-primed group proposed safety or protection-oriented solutions, whereas 64% of
the anger-primed group proposed punishment or blame-oriented solutions.^277
Incidental moods and emotions can also bias cognitive processes such as perception,^278 atten-tion,^279 and recall^280 in a way that leads the audience to make decisions congruent with their
emotional state.^281 A study that compared viewers who were and were not clinically depressed
tracked viewers’ eye movements while they looked at a series of pictures depicting both happy
and sad events. Viewers who were not clinically depressed fi xated on happy regions of the pictures
signifi cantly sooner, more often, and longer than they fi xated on sad regions. Viewers who were
depressed fi xated more on the sad regions.^282