Affective Processes in Judgment and Decision Making

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The research in this proposal attempts to articulate the role of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, "affect" means the specific quality of "goodness" or "badness" (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without awareness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective reactions occur rapidly and automatically - note how quickly one senses the feelings associated with the stimulus word "treasure" or the word "hate." We have characterized reliance on such feelings when making judgments or decisions as "the affect heuristic."The theoretical framework underlying this project comes from research in cognitive and social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that informs us about two basic modes of thinking, experiential and analytic. The experiential system is intuitive, automatic, image-based, fast, and intimately associated with affective feelings. The analytic system is deliberative, reason-based, and slow. There are strong elements of rationality in both systems. It was the experiential system that enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution. Long before there was probability theory, risk assessment, and decision analysis, there were intuition, instinct, and gut feelings to tell us whether an animal was safe to approach or the water was safe to drink. As life became more complex and humans gained more control over their environment, analytic tools were invented to "boost" the rationality of our experiential thinking.We now recognize that the experiential mode of thinking and the analytic mode of thinking are continually active, interacting in what we have characterized as "the dance of affect and reason". While we may be able to "do the right thing" without analysis (e.g., dodge a falling object), it is unlikely that we can employ analytic thinking rationally without guidance from affect. Affect is thus essential to rational action.Based upon this theoretical framework and supporting research, we plan in this project to conduct a series of experiments to better understand the role of affect in decision making and the interaction between the experiential, affect-based mode of thinking and more analytic and deliberative processes. We shall also attempt to demonstrate how the findings from this research provide insight into ways to improve a wide-range of important practical decisions about matters involving finance, medical treatments, cigarette smoking, insurance, and risk perception.