Reducing the impact bias in judgments of post-decisional affect: Distraction or task interference?
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2009, Vol 4, Issue 4
Abstract
People overestimate their affective reactions to future events and decisions — a phenomenon that has been termed “impact bias.” Evidence suggests that completing a diary detailing events contemporaneous with the focal one de-biases judgments of affect. It is generally assumed that this is because diary completion helps people to realize that they will be distracted from the focal event. However, there is another possibility: de-biasing may occur because diary completion interferes with the processing responsible for the bias. In a first experiment, we showed that diary completion also lowers affect associated with past decisions. In a second experiment, we showed that solving anagrams has the same effect. A third experiment demonstrates that this is not because affect judgments are influenced by mood changes brought about by solving anagrams. Indeed, monitoring moods lowered affect in the same way as diary completion. It appears that cognitive tasks of any sort interfere with the processing required by judgments of affect.
Authors and Affiliations
Nick Sevdalis and Nigel Harvey
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677686
- DOI -
- Views 140
- Downloads 0
Strategies using recent feedback lead to matching or maximising behaviours
One challenge facing humans (and nonhuman animal) is that some options that appear attractive locally may not turn out best in the long run. To analyse this human learning problem, we explore human performance in a dynam...
Moody experts — How mood and expertise influence judgmental anchoring
Anchoring effects, the assimilation of numerical estimates to previously considered standards, are highly robust. Two studies examined whether mood and expertise jointly moderate the magnitude of anchoring. Previous rese...
Why choose wisely if you have already paid? Sunk costs elicit stochastic dominance violations
Sunk costs have been known to elicit violations of expected utility theory, in particular, the independence or cancellation axiom. Separately, violations of the stochastic dominance principle have been demonstrated in va...
Coherence and correspondence in engineering design: informing the conversation and connecting with judgment and decision-making research
I show how the coherence/correspondence distinction can inform the conversation about decision methods for engineering design. Some engineers argue for the application of multi-attribute utility theory while others argue...
Prosociality in the economic Dictator Game is associated with less parochialism and greater willingness to vote for intergroup compromise
Is prosociality parochial or universalist? To shed light on this issue, we examine the relationship between the amount of money given to a stranger (giving in an incentivized Dictator Game) and intergroup attitudes and b...