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3. Emotional Influence on Decision and Behavior: Stimuli, States, and Subjectivity
- Russell Sage Foundation
- Chapter
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• 3 • Emotional Influence on Decision and Behavior: Stimuli, States, and Subjectivity PIOTR WINKIELMAN AND JENNIFER L. TRUJILLO HUMANS ARE passionate beings whose thoughts, decisions, and actions are shaped by emotion, sometimes with wonderful and sometimes with disastrous consequences. In this chapter we illustrate some of the major ways in which experimental psychologists, including ourselves, conceptualize and investigate basic mechanisms of emotional influence. Our focus is on basic mechanisms as we believe that figuring out the fundamental relation between emotion and cognition is critical for developing systematic accounts of when and how emotion helps or hurts decision making. The chapter is organized as follows. We start with some historical observations and then highlight a few conceptual distinctions that help organize thinking about the complex question of emotional influence. Next, we briefly review the most influential theoretical accounts of emotional influence and illustrate them with a few studies. Then, we come to the central topic of our chapter—how judgments, decisions, and behaviors are influenced by salient emotional stimuli in the environment, with special emphasis on the role of facial expressions. We will make several points. First, emotional stimuli can influence a variety of outcomes, ranging from simple preference judgments and behaviors to complex risky 69 decisions. Second, emotional stimuli can have a range of effects, from influences that are differentiated only on a positive-negative dimension to influences that are highly differentiated in emotion quality and highly dependent on a situational context. Third, emotional stimuli can exert their influence via rudimentary affective and motivational mechanisms. They can be processed automatically, without attention and intention, and influence behavior without mediation of conscious subjective experience . Throughout our chapter, we address the rationality of emotional influence, psychological and neural underpinnings of emotion-cognition interactions, and highlight open questions and future research directions. History: The Good and the Ugly of Emotion Humanity has long been fascinated by the beneficial and harmful effect of emotions on behavior. Consider sacred texts, such as the Bible, Koran, and Vedas, as well as great literature, such as the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s plays. The central themes of these works is often the destructive power of anger, pride, envy, or jealousy, but the themes also include the constructive power of love, compassion, or humility. The bright and the dark side of emotion have also been debated in philosophical texts, starting with the classics. For example, in Plato’s Phaedrus (1973), Socrates compares the human soul to a charioteer steering a pair of horses: one soars towards heaven, powered by godlike feelings, while the other is earthbound, driven by animal passions. One of the central themes in philosophical discussions of emotion is its relation to rationality and morality (Solomon 2003). On the one hand, there are many troubles with emotion in considering rationality. Instead of following coherent and externally verifiable rational principles, emotion can be governed by some obscure “emotion logic,” as expressed in Blaise Pascal’s famous quote that “the heart has reasons that the reason does not know.” In fact, beliefs based on emotion are often used as paradigmatic illustrations of irrationality.1 Emotions also seem to live in their own encapsulated world. After involuntarily jumping away from a viper in a zoo kept safely behind glass, Charles Darwin (1872/1998) wrote that his “will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced” (44). Baruch Spinoza (1677/1883) noted that “affect cannot be restrained nor removed unless by an opposed and stronger affect.” Even the legal system recognizes the negative effects of emotions on self-control by considering the “heat of passion” as a mitigating circumstance.2 In short, it is not surprising that given all of these 70 Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? [3.227.0.245] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:58 GMT) troubling aspects of emotion, Adam Smith (1759) stated that human existence amounts to a struggle between the “passions” and the “impartial spectator.” On the other hand, many have noted that emotions might also promote morality and rationality. Aristotle (1985) thought that a mark of a fully human soul is to respond to injustice with righteous anger, or to respond to suffering with compassion. David Hume (1739/1961) famously argued that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (415). Further, just as the law recognizes impairments due to “heat of passion,” it also considers “cold...