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Negative Affect and Choice: The Moderating Effect of Procedural and Outcome Accountability Nitika Garg School of Business Administration The University of Mississippi University, MS 38677 Phone: (662) 915-1648 Fax: (662) 915-5821 [email protected] Vikas Mittal Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management Rice University Houston, TX 77005 Phone: (713) 348-6234 [email protected] J. Jeffrey Inman Katz Graduate School of Business University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Phone: (412) 648-1570 [email protected] Extended Abstract Negative affect in decision making has captured the interest of researchers for quite some time in both psychology and marketing. Incidental affect, also known as ambient affect, is affect that a consumer may imbue from her environment in isolation to the decision on hand. More recently, the focus has shifted away from simple emotion valence (positive, negative) to more specific, discrete affective states such as sadness, anger and fear (Desteno et al. 2000; Lerner and Keltner 2000, 2001; Tiedens and Linton 2001; Raghunathan and Pham 1999). Researchers have found differences not only between negative and positive affect but also between different discrete emotions having the same valence (e.g., anger/sadness, pride/happiness). Lerner and Keltner (2000, 2001) proposed the ‘appraisal-tendency’ approach, which hypothesizes that ‘each emotion activates a predisposition to appraise future events in line with the central appraisal dimension that triggers the emotion’. For example, they find that fearful people make pessimistic risk assessments and future events judgments whereas angry people make optimistic assessments in the same scenarios. Research has also shown that while incidental affect influences many aspects of judgment and decision making, there are moderating factors that successfully attenuate the effect of emotions. For example, Desteno et al. (2000) find that making subjects aware of the source of their affect wipes out the influence of affect. Another factor that has been consistently shown to moderate the effect of emotions is accountability. Accountability refers to the implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one’s beliefs, feelings and/or actions to others (Lerner and Tetlock 1999). Past research has shown that increasing the level of accountability makes the decision process more elaborate and effortful (Chaiken 1980; Thompson et al. 1994). It has also been found to lead to attenuation of the effect of incidental emotions on unrelated judgments (Bodenhausen, Kramer and Susser 1994; Lerner, Goldberg and Tetlock 1998). Lerner et al. (1998) found that the tendency of anger to elicit punitive attributions of responsibility was reduced when subjects were accountable. However, more recent research in accountability has revealed that there are two forms of accountability – process and outcome based – that can have differential influence on decision making (Simonson and Staw 1992; Zhang and Mittal 2005). Under process accountability (PA) decision makers are accountable for the procedure used to arrive at a decision whereas under outcome accountability (OA) they are accountable only for the quality of the outcome, with no evaluation of their decision process (Escalas and Luce 2004). This research also shows that PA and OA differentially influence the perceived difficulty of a decision and that decision biases are relatively lower under PA than under OA. However, the few empirical studies comparing PA and OA have not examined how the influence of a contextual factor such as incidental affect on consumer choice is moderated by these two types of accountability. The objective of this research then, is to examine the interactive effect of incidental negative affect with the accountability degree (low vs. high) and type (PA vs. OA). Specifically, we examine the differential impact of two discrete, negative emotions – anger and fear – on consumer choice with accountability degree (study 1) and type (study 2) as the moderating factors. We hypothesize that consumers experiencing different negative emotions will display differential reliance on the avoidance choice strategies such as delaying the decision, and that this effect will be moderated by accountability. Our reasoning for the above hypothesis is that anger versus fear differentially impacts subject’s degree of certainty. Previous research has shown anger to have a higher degree of certainty associated with it as compared to fear (Smith and Ellsworth 1985). Garg, Inman and Mittal (2005) have further, shown that this difference in certainty can lead to angry individuals choosing the avoidance option more than sad (fear is close to sad in terms of ‘certainty’) individuals when faced with a difficult decision. On the other hand, we predict that fearful individuals should exhibit similar choice patterns under both types of accountability and under low versus high accountability as their lack of certainty should lead them to make the decision more deliberately, irrespective of the accountability degree and type. Study 1 finds that making people accountable for their decision (i.e., manipulating degree) actually amplifies the decision bias in angry condition which results in angry individuals choosing to defer choice, an avoidance response. As expected, fearful individuals do not exhibit any difference in avoidance choice across the two accountability conditions. Study 2 manipulates accountability type. We expect that under OA which has higher perceived difficulty (Zhang and Mittal 2005), angry individuals will choose the avoidance option more than fearful or neutral individuals will and also, more than angry individuals will under PA. Thus, we predict that unlike OA, PA will negate the influence of incidental affect on choice and lead to more balanced choice process, highlighting the differences across the two types of accountability. Study 2 supports these predictions. The two studies together, highlight an interesting insight into the nature of accountability – accountability degree implicitly manipulates outcome accountability. That is, when no accountability type is specified, accountable people assume outcome accountability. This is evident when we compare results for high accountability and those for OA across Study 1 and 2. The final study (study 3) seeks to not only replicate the results from Study 2 but also, examine the role of optimism in so far, as emotions with varying levels of certainty are linked to differential levels of optimism (Lerner and Keltner 2001). Examining optimism should provide a greater understanding of the underlying mechanisms that might be implicated in this phenomenon. The implications of the findings for academics as well as managers, are discussed. References Bodenhausen, Galen V., Geoffrey P. Kramer, and Karin Susser (1994), “Happiness and Stereotypic Thinking in Social Judgment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66 (April), 621-632. Brown, Christina L. (1999), “Do the Right Thing: Diverging Effects of Accountability in A Managerial Context,” Marketing Science, 18 (3), 230-246. 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Jeffrey Inman and Vikas Mittal (2005), “Incidental and Task-Related Affect: A Re-Inquiry and Extension of the Influence of Affect on Choice,” Journal of Consumer Research, 32 (June), 154-159. Johnson, Eric J. and Amos Tversky (1983), “Affect, generalization and the perception of risk,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45 (July), 20-31. Lerner, Jennifer S., Julie H. Goldberg and Philip E. Tetlock (1998), “Sober Second Thought: The Effects of Accountability, Anger and Authoritarianism on Attributions of Responsibility,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24 (June), 563-574. _______ and Dacher Keltner (2001), “Fear, Anger and Risk,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (July), 146-159. _______ and Philip E. Tetlock (1999), “Accounting for the Effects of Accountability,” Psychological Bulletin, 125 (March), 255-275. Raghunathan, Rajagopal and Michel T. Pham (1999), “All Negative Moods Are Not Equal: Motivational Influences of Anxiety and Sadness on Decision Making,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 79 (July), 56-77. Sengupta, Jaideep and Gita Venkataraman Johar (2002), “Effects of Inconsistent Attribute Information on the Predictive Value of Product Attitudes: Toward a Resolution of Opposing Perspectives,” Journal of Consumer Research, 29 (June), 39-56. Siegel-Jacobs, Karen and J. Frank Yates (1996), “Effects of Procedural and Outcome Accountability on Judgment Quality,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 65 (January), 1-17. Simonson, Itamar and Barry M. Staw (1992), “Deescalation Strategies: A Comparison of Techniques for Reducing Commitment to a Losing Courses of Action,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(4), 419-26. Tetlock, Philip E. (1983), “Accountability and Complexity of Thought,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45 (January), 74-83. Tiedens, Larissa Z. and Susan Linton (2001), “Judgment under Emotional Uncertainty: The Effects of Specific Emotions on Information Processing,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (December), 973-988. Thompson, Erik P., Robert J. Roman, Gordon B. Moskowitz, Shelly Chaiken and John A. Bargh (1994), “Accuracy Motivation Attenuates Covert Priming: The Systematic Reprocessing of Social Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66 (March), 474-489. Zhang, Y. and Mittal, V. (2005), “Effects of Procedural and Outcome Accountability,” Journal of Consumer Research, 32(3), 465-472.