Affective Processes in Judgment and Decision Making

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Affect and emotion have been actively studied in psychology for more than a century, yet the role of affective processes in judgment and decision making remains largely unexplored. Building upon recent work in cognitive and social psychology, and in neurology, the research proposed here develops and tests an affect-based theory of judgment and decision making. Within this theory, new concepts such as evaluability, proportion dominance, psychophysical numbing, and the affect heuristic are described and used to explain anomalies such as the increased attractiveness of inferior gambles and our inability to properly appreciate the significance of numerical representations of losses of human lives. We argue that, without affective guidance derived from experience or problem context, we may fail to grasp the meaning or value of commonplace things such as ice cream or more profound things such as money and human lives. Building upon this theoretical framework and supporting research, five types of studies are proposed: 1. Research on the affect heuristic tests the hypothesis that affect serves as a cue for judgments of risk and probability. 2. Research on evaluability tests the hypothesis that the meaning of a stimulus is reflected in the precision of a person's affective feelings toward that stimulus. More precise affective impressions reflect more precise meanings, and they carry more weight in judgment and decision making. 3. Research on affect integration investigates the manner in which multiple affective feelings are integrated into an impression, judgment, or decision. 4. Studies of individual differences seek to develop measures to differentiate intuitive, experiential, and affective thinkers from persons whose thinking is less guided by affect. 5. Prescriptive research attempts to demonstrate how an understanding of affective processes can lead to improvements in the quality of people's judgments and decisions.