Emotion, decision making & Time

Attitudes and Behavior

• Attitude-behavior (in)consistency– Goodness of emotion as a predictor– How much is current situation like the choice

situation? – People have difficulty judging future preferences

• What ice cream will you want tomorrow?

Real and Simulated choices

• Why can’t people predict their future preferences?– People have a bad theory of motivational effects

• Valuation and devaluation

• Approach, avoidance, and time

– Hard to simulate future motivational states– People cannot predict effects of time on choice

Valuation and Devaluation

• What is the effect of motivation on preference?

• Valuation

• Devaluation

Example of Devaluation• This study uses an appetizing manipulation

• Need to eat– Eating a small amount increases need to eat

• Popcorn taste test:– High need to eat: Taste test first (ratings last)– Low need to eat: Taste test last (ratings first)

• Rated attractiveness of consumer products– Food related (11 items)– Food unrelated (32 items: a variety of products)– Ratings mixed in with other unrelated tasks

Simple Devaluation

-0.25

-0.2

-0.15

-0.1

-0.05

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

Food Items Nonfood Items

Item Type

*

Approach, avoidance, and distance

• Goal gradients– Lewin; Miller– Change in goal strength with distance to goal

• Physical distance or temporal distance

Approach GradientAvoidance Gradient

Recent Evidence:

Busemeyer Pennington & Roese

Recent Evidence:

Busemeyer Pennington & RoeseDistance

Predicting choices

• People don’t know all of this– That makes their future predictions bad

• Simulated choices do not take these factors into account

• People also fail to take future events into account– Gilbert and future prediction

• What is the influence of getting married, winning the lottery, or getting denied tenure on future happiness?

Temporal effects

• Temporal construal– Events in the future may be conceptualized more

abstractly than near events– Specific events may have more emotional content

• People have theories about spreading events over time– A desire for increasing sequences (e.g., salary)– A desire to spread out good outcomes