Kochanowska Ewa, Reutskaja Elena, Wormwood Jolie
Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, 213 McConnell Hall, 15 Academic Way, Durham, NH, 03824, USA.
Department of Marketing, IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain.
Sci Rep. 2024 Dec 30;14(1):32129. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-83935-x.
Affective feelings exert a powerful influence on decision making, even when the source of those feelings is incidental, i.e., unrelated to the decision at hand. Research on the role of affect in decision making has typically focused on how incidental affect shapes evaluations of an individual target, and thus decisions about how to engage with that target. It is less clear, however, if and how individuals use their incidental affective feelings when evaluating and comparing multiple competing targets and deciding which one to choose. To investigate this, we modified the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) to include two competing targets, presented sequentially, that individuals needed to choose between. In two pre-registered studies (N = 196 and N = 214), participants were presented with pairs of landscape images (e.g., beaches, lakes) and asked to choose which image in the pair they liked more. Each landscape was preceded by an affective prime: a briefly flashed image of a face that was either smiling (a positive prime), scowling (a negative prime), or neutral (a neutral prime). We found that participants were significantly more likely to choose landscapes preceded by primes of more positive valence, and this effect was driven by trials on which the positive prime came second. Our studies demonstrate that decision makers use their incidental affective feelings when making choices among competing alternatives, and introduce a novel methodology for understanding the constructive role of affect in preference formation.
情感感受对决策有着强大的影响，即使这些感受的来源是偶然的，即与手头的决策无关。关于情感在决策中作用的研究通常集中在偶然情感如何塑造对单个目标的评估，进而影响关于如何与该目标互动的决策。然而，个体在评估和比较多个相互竞争的目标并决定选择哪一个时，是否以及如何利用他们偶然产生的情感感受，这一点尚不清楚。为了研究这一问题，我们对情感错误归因程序（AMP）进行了修改，使其包含两个依次呈现的相互竞争的目标，个体需要在两者之间做出选择。在两项预先注册的研究（N = 196和N = 214）中，向参与者展示成对的风景图像（如海滩、湖泊），并要求他们选择更喜欢其中哪一幅图像。每幅风景图像之前都有一个情感启动刺激：一张短暂闪现的面部图像，要么微笑（积极启动刺激）、皱眉（消极启动刺激），要么中性（中性启动刺激）。我们发现，参与者显著更有可能选择由更积极效价的启动刺激之前呈现的风景，并且这种效应是由积极启动刺激排在第二位的试验所驱动的。我们的研究表明，决策者在相互竞争的选项中进行选择时会利用他们偶然产生的情感感受，并引入了一种新的方法来理解情感在偏好形成中的建构作用。
