DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE COGNITIVE SCIENCE ISRN: LIU-IDA/KOGVET-A--13/009—SE 729A80 MASTER THESIS Affective Biases and Heuristics in Decision Making Emotion regulation as a factor for decision making competence Author: William Hagman Supervisor: Daniel Västfjäll Examiner: Arne Jönsson [26/6 2013] Stanovich and West (2008) explored if measures of cognitive ability ignored some important aspects of thinking itself, namely that cognitive ability alone is not enough to generally prevent biased thinking. In this thesis a series of decision making (DM) tasks is tested to see if emotion regulation (ER) is a factor for the decision process and therefore should be a measured in decision making competence. A set of DM tasks was compiled involving both affective and cognitive dimensions. 400 participants completed an online web- survey. The results showed that ER ability was significantly associated with performance in various DM tasks that involved both heuristic and biased thinking. These findings suggest that ER can be a factor in decision making competence. Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................................... 7 1 Background ..................................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Real life decision making ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Emotions .................................................................................................................................................. 2 1.3 Cognitive ability ....................................................................................................................................... 6 1.4 Emotion regulation .................................................................................................................................. 7 1.5 Purpose .................................................................................................................................................... 7 2 Method and Design ........................................................................................................................................ 8 2.1 Cognitive Ability Tests ............................................................................................................................. 8 2.2 Affect recollection task ............................................................................................................................ 9 2.3 Emotion regulation measures ................................................................................................................. 9 3 Result and discussion .................................................................................................................................... 10 3.1 Correlations between the measures ..................................................................................................... 10 3.2 Cognitive tasks ....................................................................................................................................... 11 3.2.1 Jellybeans ........................................................................................................................................... 11 3.2.2 Proportion dominance effect ............................................................................................................. 11 3.2.3 Time Discounting Task ........................................................................................................................ 12 3.2.4 Conjunction Fallacy ......................................................................................................................... 12 3.2.5 Framing ........................................................................................................................................... 13 3.2.6 Anchoring and Adjustment ............................................................................................................. 13 3.3 Emotional Tasks ..................................................................................................................................... 15 3.3.1 Money/kisses .................................................................................................................................. 15 3.3.2 Framing ........................................................................................................................................... 17 3.3.3 Panda .............................................................................................................................................. 17 3.3.4 Fruit/chocolate ............................................................................................................................... 18 3.3.5 Feedback in choices ........................................................................................................................ 18 3.3.6 Gamble Regret ................................................................................................................................ 19 3.3.7 Moral dilemma ............................................................................................................................... 20 3.3.8 Affect Heuristics.............................................................................................................................. 21 4 General Discussion ....................................................................................................................................... 24 5 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................... 27 References: ...................................................................................................................................................... 28 Appendix 1 ....................................................................................................................................................... 32 Block One ..................................................................................................................................................... 32 Panda ....................................................................................................................................................... 32 Moral dilemmas ....................................................................................................................................... 32 Money/kisses ........................................................................................................................................... 33 Anchoring and adjustment ...................................................................................................................... 34 Fruit/Chocolate ........................................................................................................................................ 35 AFFECT HEURISTIC ................................................................................................................................... 35 Block Two..................................................................................................................................................... 36 Conjunction Fallacy .................................................................................................................................. 36 Proportion dominance effect .................................................................................................................. 37 Framing .................................................................................................................................................... 38 Jellybeans................................................................................................................................................. 38 Time Discounting Task ............................................................................................................................. 39 Feedback in Choices ................................................................................................................................ 39 Gambles Regret ....................................................................................................................................... 40 DERS ......................................................................................................................................................... 41 Emotion regulation quick question ......................................................................................................... 42 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Daniel Västfjäll for giving me the opportunity to accomplish this thesis. I would also like to thank Marcus Mayorga for his support in collecting the data for this thesis. 1 Background One problem with the field of decision making is the question: what is a good decision? Is it an optimal decision strategy or happiness with the outcome of the decision? If you only count the outcomes, then you easy fall into the trap of hindsight, which is given what you know now versus what you knew then the decision you made was a poor one. But to cite Bruine de Bruin et al (2007, p. 490): “… although good decision-making processes can lead to poor outcomes, that should happen less