Department of Economics, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, United States of America.
Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Dec 16;15(12):e0243044. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243044. eCollection 2020.
Researchers in the social sciences have increasingly studied how emotions influence decision-making. We argue that research on emotions arising naturally in real-world environments is critical for the generalizability of insights in this domain, and therefore to the development of this field. Given this, we argue for the increased use of the "quasi-field experiment" methodology, in which participants make decisions or complete tasks after as-if-random real-world events determine their emotional state. We begin by providing the first critical review of this emerging literature, which shows that real-world events provide emotional shocks that are at least as strong as what can ethically be induced under laboratory conditions. However, we also find that most previous quasi-field experiment studies use statistical techniques that may result in biased estimates. We propose a more statistically-robust approach, and illustrate it using an experiment on negative emotion and risk-taking, in which sports fans completed risk-elicitation tasks immediately after watching a series of NFL games. Overall, we argue that when appropriate statistical methods are used, the quasi-field experiment methodology represents a powerful approach for studying the impact of emotion on decision-making.
社会科学领域的研究人员越来越多地研究情绪如何影响决策。我们认为，研究真实环境中自然产生的情绪对于该领域的洞察力的普遍性，以及该领域的发展至关重要。有鉴于此，我们主张更多地使用“准现场实验”方法，即参与者在真实世界事件决定其情绪状态之后做出决策或完成任务。我们首先对这一新兴文献进行了批判性回顾，结果表明，真实世界事件所引发的情绪冲击至少与实验室条件下伦理上可诱发的冲击一样强烈。然而，我们也发现，大多数先前的准现场实验研究使用的统计技术可能会导致有偏差的估计。我们提出了一种更具统计学稳健性的方法，并使用一项关于消极情绪和风险承担的实验来说明，该实验中体育迷在观看了一系列 NFL 比赛后立即完成风险诱发任务。总的来说，我们认为，当使用适当的统计方法时，准现场实验方法代表了一种研究情绪对决策影响的有力方法。
