The Interaction of Affect and Deliberation in Decision Making

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The proposed research attempts to articulate the interrelated roles of affect and deliberation 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. We have characterized reliance on such feelings when making judgments or decisions as "the affect heuristic."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 plan in this project to conduct 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. These experiments are designed to test specific predictions about the way that individual and environmental factors such as time pressure, cognitive load, age, mood, and instruction to think or give reasons influence the balance of affective and deliberative processing and the judgments and decisions that result from this processing. We shall also address the broader impacts of this research, by demonstrating how the findings provide insight into ways to improve a wide-range of important practical decisions about matters involving finance, medical treatments, cigarette smoking, health insurance, and risk perception.