Arousal and Economic Decision Making

Salar Jahedi (), Cary Deck () and Dan Ariely ()
Additional contact information
Salar Jahedi: RAND Corporation
Dan Ariely: Duke University

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: Previous experiments have found that subjecting participants to cognitive load leads to poorer decision making, consistent with dual-system models of behavior. Rather than taxing the cognitive system, this paper reports the results of an experiment that takes a complementary approach: arousing the emotional system. The results indicate that exposure to arousing visual stimuli as compared to neutral images has a negligible impact on performance in arithmetic tasks, impatience, risk taking in the domain of losses, and snack choice although we nd that arousal modestly increases in risk-taking in the gains domain and increases susceptibility to anchoring e ects. We nd the ef- fect of arousal on decision making to be smaller and less consistent then the e ect of increased cognitive load for the same tasks.

Keywords: Dual System; Sexual Arousal; Impatience; Risk Taking; Behavioral Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-neu and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chapman.edu/research-and-institutions/e ... conomic-behavior.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Arousal and economic decision making (2017)
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:chu:wpaper:16-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Megan Luetje ().