Decision Making: Choosing Among Alternatives • 379INCIDENTAL EMOTIONS AFFECT DECISIONS
How might the fact that you feel happy or sad, or are in an environment that causes
positive or negative feelings, affect your decisions? There is evidence that decision
making is affected by these incidental emotions, even though they are not directly
related to the decision. For example, in a paper titled “Clouds Make Nerds Look
Good,” Uri Simonsohn (2007) reports an analysis of university admissions decisions
in which he found that applicants’ academic attributes were more heavily weighted
on cloudy days than on sunny days (nonacademic attributes won out on sunny days).
In another study, he found that prospective students visiting an academically highly
rated university were more likely to enroll if they had visited the campus on a cloudy
day (Simonsohn, 2009).
An example of how emotions can affect the economic decisions of establishing sell-
ing and buying prices is provided in a study by Jennifer Lerner and coworkers (2004).
Participants viewed one of three fi lm clips, calculated to elicit emotions: (1) a person
dying (sadness); (2) a person using a dirty toilet (disgust); and (3) fi sh at the Great
Barrier Reef (neutral). Participants in the sadness and disgust groups were also asked to
write about how they would feel if they were in the situation shown in the clip.
Lerner and coworkers then gave participants a highlighter set and determined (1)
the price for which participants would be willing to sell the set (sell condition) and
(2) the price at which they would be willing to choose the set instead of accepting the
money (choice condition). The choice condition is roughly equivalent to setting the
price they would pay for it.
The left bars in ● Figure 13.11 show that participants in the disgust and sadness
group were willing to sell the set for less than the neutral group. Lerner suggests that
this occurs because disgust is associated with a need to expel things and sad emotions
are associated with a need for change. The right bars show that participants in the sad
group were willing to pay more for the set. This also fi ts with the idea of sadness being
associated with a need for change. The proposed reasons behind setting buying and sell-
ing prices are hypothetical at this point, but whatever the reasons, this study and others
support the idea that a person’s mood can infl uence economic decisions.DECISIONS CAN DEPEND
ON HOW CHOICES ARE PRESENTED
Our discussion of deductive and inductive reasoning has shown that rea-
soning is affected by more than just the facts of the situation. This also
happens in decision making when a person’s judgments are affected by the
way choices are stated. For example, take the decision about whether to
become a potential organ donor. Although a poll has found that 85 percent
of Americans approve of organ donation, only 28 percent have actually
granted permission by signing a donor card. This signing of the card is
called an opt-in procedure, because it requires the person to take an active
step (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003).
The low American consent rate for organ donation also occurs in other
countries, such as Denmark (4 percent), the United Kingdom (27 percent),
and Germany (12 percent). One thing that these countries have in common
is that they all use an opt-in procedure. However, in France and Belgium
the consent rate is more than 99 percent. These countries use an opt-out
procedure, in which everyone is a potential organ donor unless he or she
requests not to be.
Besides having important ramifi cations for public health (in 1995 more
than 45,000 people in the United States died waiting for a suitable donor
organ), the difference between opt-in and opt-out procedures has impor-
tant implications for the theory of decision making. According to the utility
approach, people make decisions based on expected utility value; therefore,
their decisions shouldn’t depend on how the potential choices are stated.N = Neutral
D = Disgust
S = SadPriceSell price Choice (buy)
price$543210
NDD S N S●FIGURE 13.11 How incidental emotions
aff ect decisions regarding setting prices to sell or
buy an item. (Source: Based on data from J. S. Lerner,
D. A. Small, & G. Lowenstein, “Heart Strings and Purse Strings:
Eff ects of Emotions on Economic Transactions,” Psychological
Science, 15, 337–341, 2004).
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