The Role of Affect in Decision Making
Abstract Until recently, emotions attracted little attention from decision researchers. Decision making was viewed as a cognitive process—a matter of estimating which of various alternative actions would yield the most positive consequences. Decision makers were assumed to evaluate the potential consequences of their decisions dispassionately and to choose actions that maximized the “utility” of those consequences. Once chosen, it was assumed that the utility-maximizing course of action would be implemented automatically. The critiques of traditional decision theory that emerged in the late 1960s under the heading of “behavioral decision theory” largely adhered to this cognitive perspective. The main thrust of behavioral decision theory has been to identify (1) cognitive errors that people make when they judge the likelihood of future consequences and (2) simplifying heuristics that people use to cope with the complexity of decision making (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). The boom in decision research associated with the emergence of behavioral decision theory, then, largely ignored the role played by emotions in decision making. The last several years, however, have witnessed a burst of interest in the role of emotions in decision making. Research conducted within the last decade has shown that even incidental affect—affect that is unrelated to the decision at hand—can have a significant impact on judgment and choice (for reviews, see Clore, 1992; Forgas, 1995; Isen, 1993; Lerner & Keltner, 2000; Schwarz, 1990), that (2) emotional deficits, whether innate (Damasio, 1994) or experimentally induced (Wilson et al., 1993), can degrade the quality of decision making, and that (3) incorporating affect in models of decision making can greatly increase their explanatory power (Lopes, 1987; Lopes & Oden, 1998; Mellers, Schwartz, Ho, & Ritov, 1997). Thus, contemporary decision research is characterized by an intense focus on emotion. Our goal in this chapter is to highlight and organize these new emotion-related developments in decision research. We organize our review around a general theoretical framework for understanding the different ways in which emotions enter into decision making. Such a framework, we hope, can facilitate integration of the wideranging findings that have emerged from recent research and shed new light on several central topics in decision theory, such as how people deal with outcomes that are uncertain and how they discount delayed costs and benefits.