Decision Making

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Humans make several decisions on their everyday life, from the time an individual open his/her eyes to the time they closes them. Researchers have study over decades the process of decision making to understand how and why individuals make certain decisions. Several theories have been proposed to explain how individuals get to make a choice. Among several theories, Tversky and Kahneman (1981) proposed that individuals make choices depending on the framing of the question, namely framing effect. That is, individuals would choose different options depending on how the question is been asked.
Interestingly, some individuals like to choose risk averse choices (e.g., “choices that involves gain” p. 453) while others risk taking choices (“choices that involve losses” p. 453; Tversky & Kahnman, 1981). One of the reason why participants would differ in their choices under the framing effect could be due to what has been framed, what is affected (e.g., losing money versus losing human lives) and how the frame effect is measured (Levin, Schneider, & Gaeth, 1998). One other possibility could be emotions an individual is experiencing while making the decisions.
Emotions and Decision Making
Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1991) coined the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, which states that emotional process can guide decision-making. It was noted that when individuals present damaged to prefrontal areas of the brain, presented deficits in decision-making (Damasio, Everitt, & Bishop, 1996). With this line of reasoning, De Martino, Kumaran, Seymour and Dolan (2006) studied how emotions were related to decision making and if framing effect would still present. On this study, it was found that participants who did a financial decision-making task exhibi...

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...o are rejected would have problems with decision-making.
What’s more, when participants played the ultimatum game and emotions like sadness were induced by showing video clips, participants were more likely to have lower acceptance rates of unfair offers (Harle´ & Sanfey, 2007) suggesting that even induce emotions play an important role on decision making. Further, the rejection of unfair offers was not only attributed to the emotion of sadness (Harle´ & Sanfey, 2007) but also to the emotion of anger (Pillutla & Murnighan, 1996). For instance, the wounded pride/spite model proposed that when individuals perceived something as unfair would react with feelings of anger and act spitefully (Pillutla & Murnighan, 1996). As such, when participants play the ultimatum game and perceived unfair choices, participants can become angry and not be able to make good decisions.

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