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How Anxiety Leads to Suboptimal Decisions Under Risky Choice Situations
Author(s) -
Yang Zhiyong,
Saini Ritesh,
Freling Traci
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
risk analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1539-6924
pISSN - 0272-4332
DOI - 10.1111/risa.12343
Subject(s) - anxiety , worry , psychology , context (archaeology) , cognitive bias , distress , cognitive psychology , ambiguity , perception , social psychology , negative affectivity , sadness , clinical psychology , cognition , developmental psychology , anger , psychiatry , paleontology , linguistics , philosophy , neuroscience , biology
The current research proposes that situationally activated anxiety—whether incidental or integral—impairs decision making. In particular, we theorize that anxiety drives decisionmakers to more heavily emphasize subjective anecdotal information in their decision making, at the expense of more factual statistical information—a deleterious heuristic called the anecdotal bias . Four studies provide consistent support for this assertion. Studies 1A and 1B feature field experiments that demonstrate the role of incidental anxiety in enhancing the anecdotal bias in a choice context. Study 2 builds on these findings, manipulating individuals’ incidental anxiety and showing how this affects the anecdotal bias in the context of message evaluations. Study 2 also provides direct evidence that only high‐arousal negative emotions such as anxiety/worry enhance the anecdotal bias, not just any negative emotion (e.g., sadness). While the first three studies examine how incidental anxiety impacts choice, the last study demonstrates the effect of integral anxiety on decision making, manipulating anxiety by intensifying participants’ perceived risk. Our results show that—consistent with findings from our first three studies—the anecdotal bias is enhanced when anxiety is heightened by individuals’ perception of risk.