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4. Feeling, Searching, and Preparing: How Affective States Alter Information Seeking
- Russell Sage Foundation
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• 4 • Feeling, Searching, and Preparing: How Affective States Alter Information Seeking KAREN GASPER AND LINDA M. ISBELL INDIVIDUALS MAKE an astonishing number of decisions each day. They decide on mundane matters (what to wear, drink, and read), important matters (whether one has prepared enough for a test, whether to hire a person, and whether one is persuaded by an argument), and occasionally on life-altering matters (whom to marry, where to move, and if one should have children). To help them make these decisions, people can access a seemingly endless amount of information. The simple decision of what to eat for breakfast, for example, might require a person to search the refrigerator, cabinets, and pantry, and to identify appropriate foods. The person may read the nutritional labels to learn the salt, carbohydrate, fat, and calorie content of the food. Once the person decides to have eggs for breakfast, the individual might consult a cookbook to determine whether the eggs should be scrambled, sunny side up, or made into a tasty frittata. Because people’s lives are so demanding, they often do not have the time or the cognitive resources to devote much conscious attention toward all the decisions that have to be made on a daily basis. Luckily, unconscious processes often operate in conjunction with conscious thought to help people navigate through this complex informational world, shaping what information they seek out, how 93 much information they seek out, and how they use this information to form a decision. One factor that might act as a navigational guide, gently shaping the type of information that people seek out and how they process the information , is people’s feelings. In fact, the key purpose of affective states is to sustain, guide, and direct action (Arnold 1960). Nevertheless, many people wonder whether affective states are appropriate guides. This wonderment inspired the central question of this book: Do feelings help or hurt the decision making process? Like many questions, the answer to this one is complicated because affect can both help and hurt decision making depending on the situation . The goal of the chapter is to use research on moods and information seeking as an illustration of some of the broader conceptual issues that should be taken into account when addressing the question of whether emotions help or hurt decision making. In describing how affect, in particular moods, might influence decision making, we propose some basic principles that determine how moods function to alter decisions. We focus on how mood might alter a relatively unexplored facet of decision making: the process of information seeking (Schwarz 1990). Specifically, we delineate how mood should alter the degree to which people seek out detailed information, diagnostic information, confirmatory information, preparatory task information, and competency information. Mood States and How They Inform Decisions First, we want to define mood and distinguish it from emotions. Moods and emotions are two different types of affective experiences. Moods, unlike emotions, are transitory, mild, and diffuse affective states that do not have a readily accessible or salient cause (Frijda 1994). Because moods are not clearly linked to any eliciting conditions in the way that emotions are, moods tend to operate in the background of one’s daily activities, whereas emotions operate in the foreground, where they attract one’s attention. For instance, individuals experience a sad mood as a global sense of unpleasantness due to reasons that are not clearly identifiable (for example, “I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning”), whereas they experience a sad emotion as a more highly differentiated affective response to something that is specific and identifiable (for example, “I feel sad because I did not win the award”). Because mood states lack a specific salient cause, people are likely to experience them as a reaction to whatever is in one’s focus at the time (Clore, Gasper, and Garvin 2001). 94 Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? [3.219.167.163] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:54 GMT) Given that mood states are common experiences that easily can be perceived as part of one’s reaction to a task at hand, they have the potential to alter many decisions in subtle ways. If affect operates as an informational tour guide, then mood states are the guides that are most likely to be on duty. For this reason, we limit our discussion to mood states rather than emotional states. We focus on the two most commonly experienced mood states: happy moods...