When happy people make society unhappy: How incidental emotions affect compliance behavior

Martin Fochmann, Frank Hechtner, Erich Kirchler and Peter N. C. Mohr

No 237, arqus Discussion Papers in Quantitative Tax Research from arqus - Arbeitskreis Quantitative Steuerlehre

Abstract: Emotions have a strong impact on our everyday life, including our mental health, sleep pattern, overall well-being, and judgment and decision making. Our paper is the first study to show that incidental emotions, i.e., emotions not related to the actual choice problem, influence the compliance behavior of individuals. In particular, we provide evidence that individuals have a lower willingness to comply with social norms after being primed with positive incidental emotions compared with aversive emotions. This result is replicated in a second study. As an extension to our first study, we add a neutral condition as a control. Willingness to comply in this condition ranges between the other two conditions. Importantly, this finding indicates that the valence of an emotion but not its arousal drives the influence on compliance behavior. Furthermore, we show that priming with incidental emotions is only effective if individuals are - at least to some extent - emotionally sensitive.

Keywords: compliance behavior; emotions; cheating; tax evasion; norms; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D91 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hap, nep-hpe and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/200237/1/1668993708.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:arqudp:237

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in arqus Discussion Papers in Quantitative Tax Research from arqus - Arbeitskreis Quantitative Steuerlehre
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).