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On the Influence of Emotion on Decision Making: The Case of Charitable Giving

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Human-Centric Decision-Making Models for Social Sciences

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 502))

Abstract

This chapter summarizes and discusses methodologies and findings of recent research focused on the influence of emotion on decision-making in general and charitable giving in particular. Exploring how appraisal theory findings carry over to the decision of charitable giving, we experimentally examine the influence of incidental sadness and anger on charitable donations to an identified or a statistical victim. First, subjects viewed a previously validated film clip and provided a written response to how they would feel in the situation in the clip. Subjects then viewed a charity letter and had the opportunity to make a donation. Overall, participants in both the sad and angry conditions donated more than participants in the control condition. Sad individuals donated more money to a statistical victim relative to individuals in a neutral condition. This finding is consistent with appraisal-tendency theories. Angry individuals, however, did not donate significantly more to either an identified or statistical victim relative to individuals in a neutral condition. Self-reported emotions reveal discrete levels of sadness elicited in the sad condition, but elevated levels of additional negative emotions in the anger conditions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On the mapping of the distinction between emotion, affect, and mood, Ryan Kandrack has benefitted from personal communication with Dr. Nicole Verrochi Coleman.

  2. 2.

    Interestingly, disgust and anger—used in our study—are located in close proximity to each other in Smith and Ellsworth’s [49] plot of 15 emotions where the vertical axis ranges from Situational to Human Control and the horizontal axis ranges from Other-Responsibility/Control to Self-Responsibility/Control. Both emotions are located in the Other-Responsibility/Control-Human Control quadrant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Palumbo-Donahue School of Business Administration, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Ryan Kandrack & Gustav Lundberg

  2. McAnulty College of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Ryan Kandrack

  3. Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, Finland

    Gustav Lundberg

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  1. Ryan Kandrack
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  2. Gustav Lundberg
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Correspondence to Gustav Lundberg .

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  1. Faculty of Business Administration, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan

    Peijun Guo

  2. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Witold Pedrycz

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Kandrack, R., Lundberg, G. (2014). On the Influence of Emotion on Decision Making: The Case of Charitable Giving. In: Guo, P., Pedrycz, W. (eds) Human-Centric Decision-Making Models for Social Sciences. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 502. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39307-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39307-5_3

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