Feeling the Future: The Emotional Oracle Effect

Michel Tuan Pham, Leonard Lee and Andrew T. Stephen

Journal of Consumer Research, 2012, vol. 39, issue 3, 461 - 477

Abstract: Eight studies reveal an intriguing phenomenon: individuals who have higher trust in their feelings can predict the outcomes of future events better than individuals with lower trust in their feelings. This emotional oracle effect was found across a variety of prediction domains, including (a) the 2008 US Democratic presidential nomination, (b) movie box-office success, (c) the winner of American Idol, (d) the stock market, (e) college football, and even (f) the weather. It is mostly high trust in feelings that improves prediction accuracy rather than low trust in feelings that impairs it. However, the effect occurs only among individuals who possess sufficient background knowledge about the prediction domain, and it dissipates when the prediction criterion becomes inherently unpredictable. The authors hypothesize that the effect arises because trusting one's feelings encourages access to a "privileged window" into the vast amount of predictive information that people learn, often unconsciously, about their environments.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/663823 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/663823 (text/html)

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:oup:jconrs:doi:10.1086/663823

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Research is currently edited by Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen and Stacy Wood

More articles in Journal of Consumer Research from Journal of Consumer Research Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().