Five experiments investigated the effects of mood and judgmental heuristics on decision making under uncertainty. According to the mood-and-general-knowledge model (Bless, 2000), the assimilation-accommodation model (Fiedler, 2000) and the numeric-priming account of anchoring (Jacowitz & Kahneman, 1995; Wong & Kwong, 2000), happy individuals should rely more on the anchoring heuristic in decision making under uncertainty. However, the semantic-priming account of anchoring (Strack & Mussweiler, 1997) and the processing account of mood (Bless, 2000; Fiedler, 2000) predict that it is sad individuals who should be more susceptible to the anchoring bias. Experiment 1 used a new methodological paradigm, which captures the key methodologies of past mood and anchoring studies to test these two competing hypotheses. The overall results of Experiment 1 found that neither positive nor negative mood influenced the reliance on the anchoring heuristic, but a post-hoc analysis suggests that happy participants relied more on the anchoring heuristic in making decisions for low personal relevance, low familiarity scenarios whereas sad participants were more susceptible to the anchoring heuristic in making high personal relevance, high familiarity decisions. Experiment 2 tested this suggestion and confirmed that personal relevance significantly moderated the effects of mood on the use of the anchoring heuristic. Experiment 3 replicated this result and showed that sad participants processed longer in the high personal relevance condition whereas happy participants were comparably fast in making high and low personal relevance decisions. These findings support the suggestion that it was changes in processing styles that were responsible for the effects of mood and personal relevance on the reliance of the anchoring heuristic. In addition, Experiment 3 found no evidence that familiarity moderated the effects of mood on anchoring. Experiment 4 extended these results to the domain of general knowledge questions but failed to show that an individual difference variable, the Need for Cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) moderated these effects. The fifth and final experiment extended these findings to a different kind of heuristic, the representativeness heuristic. It was predicted and found that, contrary to the previous results, happy participants relied more on the representativeness heuristic in the high personal relevance condition. These findings have important implications for the theories of mood, judgmental heuristics and decision making under uncertainty.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/188133 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Chan, Yu Man Norman, Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Psychology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Yu Man Norman Chan, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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