Lecture 8: emotions and economic behavior Flashcards
Ekman
basic emotions are when everyone can feel and recognize it.
but all emotions can be basic, some languages have a word for it, but they can still feel it.
Nico Frida
famous for his book “the emotions” and his paper “law of emotions”.
he argues that emotions are lawfull phenomena. They aren’t random, but predictable and anything that is predictable can be studied.
laws of emotions
- law of situational meaning; constitution
- law of concern; control precedence
- law of comparative feeling
law of situational meaning
emotions arise in response to the meaning structures of given situations: different emotions arise in response to different meaning structures of given situations. not an event, but our interpretations.
constitution
Law of concern
emotions arise in response to events that are important to the individuals’ goals, motives or concerns.
control precedence
Law of comparative feeling
the intensity of emotion depends on the relationship between an event and some frame of reference against which the event is evaluated.
how were emotions seen before Frida
emotions were seen as bad and useless. they would interfere with rationality. a source of confusion, disturbed perceptions and conveyed biases.
But because of philosophy it has been known for centuries that emotions influence decision making and may outperform calculations.
antonio damasio
did brain studies on how brain regions influence people’s emotions. Phineas gace.
found that people with certain brain damage lose the ability to lose emotions and therefore to make decisions.
feelings aren’t a luxury, but a means of communicating
emotions in utility theory
if you think emotions = affect = valence you could integrate them in utility theory.
good emotion is more utility and bad emotion = less utility.
valence= pleasentness
difference in affect rich and poor emotions
- affect rich: have a stronger curvature in weight
- affect poor: less strong curvature in weight
argued that affect poor choices work like prospect theory and affect rich ones have a stronger curvature.
or that affect rich had a distortion of propabilities.
what is wrong with the theories about difference in affect rich and poor choices
positive or negative affect is not the same as emotion. We have a large variety of emotions and you can not capture them on one dimension
problems with valence (positive or negative)
a positive emotion has to do with satisfaction
a positive emotion is one that motivates us to obey the rules
a positive emotion is one that exemplifies the virtues (show by example)
Savage
was the first to write about the effect of individual emotions. he developed a theory with assumptions
- we feel regret (and rejoice)
- this influences outcome validation (better if you rejoice, worse if you regret)
- we can predict feeling beforehand
- we take predicted regret into account when choosing and choose to avoid it (regret aversion)
so to experience regret you must know the other possible outcomes.
bentham did this with his list of dolors and hedons
Jane Beattie, Zeelenberg, van der Pligt & de Vries (1996)
article about effect of feedback on regret. they gave people matching tasks that were either risky or safe, but made them equally attractive and then manipulated the feedback.
- if people knew they would eventually know the outcome they would choose the safer outcome
regret appeal
when someone tries to get you to do something, or you’ll regret it. for example the post code lottery
- zeelenberg studied post code lottery and state lottery, found that for the post code lottery the more regret people expect the more likely they are to play. but this was not the case for the state lottery
regret and dissapointment
in a study with adults with a lesion they found that these people do feel dissapointment apart from regret, so they are different.
what do we regret the most?
the things we should have done.
we can also learn from regret
is regret an emotion
- it does have a facial expression
- other primates feel it (but display it differently)
- there is cross cultural evidence
so it is implied that is a basic emotion.
dissapointment
is related to regret. regret is about the decision and dissapointment about the outcome
Mellers
studied emotional responses and made a mathematical equation for it
Mellers experiment
gamble one and two were spinning wheels that people could choose between.
then in some conditions participants got the feedback and in others they didn’t know the other outcome.
when choosing between gamble one and two subjective pleasure applies.
Mellers models / equations
- r is the regret function
- with partial feedback the subjective expected pleasure equation associated with the gambles is smaller than with complete feedback.
Wiliam James
people don’t randomly think things, but they think things because they want to do things and we extend that with feelings.
feeling sgive control precedence and we act on our concerns through them.
The emotion process
something happens -> you have affect, feelings etc. -> you react
if we know this it is easier to understand what behavior will follow.
more differences between regret and dissapointment
- different appraisals
- different counterfactuals
- different experiences
- different brain regions are associated
- different behavior is evidence
