Joseph P. Forgas, University of New South Wales
Title: Affective influences on social judgments and decisions: The role of information processing strategies
It is a nice sunny day, you are in a good mood, and you are on your way to interview an applicant for a job. What will you ask from the applicant? How will you formulate a judgment, and what sorts of decision-making strategies will you employ? More generally, how does temporary mood influence the kind of judgmental and decision-making strategies people adopt in such situations? This paper discusses the role of affect in the way people select, learn, recall and interpret information when performing a social judgment or decision. A multi-process theory of social judgments will be outlined, the Affect Infusion Model (AIM; Forgas, 2002) suggesting that the influence of affective states on judgments and decisions depends on what kind of information processing strategies people adopt in different situations. The model recognizes that affect can influence both the content, and the process of cognition in judgmental tasks. However, the AIM also predicts that affective influences only occur in tasks that call for open, constructive processing strategies. The paper summarizes the results of a series of programmatic experiments demonstrating the process-dependence of affective influences on social judgments. Laboratory and field experiments will be described, demonstrating consistent mood effects in circumstances that call for constructive processing strategies on judgments about interpersonal behaviors, impression formation judgments, attribution judgments, relationship judgments, decisions about bargaining and negotiating strategies, and decisions about interpersonal behaviors. The relevance of these results for our understanding of mechanisms of social judgments will be discussed, and the implications of the findings for applied areas and professional practice in clinical, counselling, health, consumer, marketing and organizational psychology will also be considered.
This work was supported by a Special Investigator award from the Australian Research Council, and the Research Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The contribution of Joseph Ciarrochi, Stephanie Moylan, Patrick Vargas and Joan Webb to this project is gratefully acknowledged. Please address all correspondence in connection with this paper to Joseph P. Forgas, at the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia; email . For further information on this research project, see also website at www.psy.unsw.edu.au/~joef/jforgas.htm .