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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Affect heuristic | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_heuristic | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:57:18.202032+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Subliminal affective response === The cause of affect does not necessarily have to be consciously perceived. A study conducted by Winkielman, Zajonc and Schwarz (1997) demonstrated the speed at which an affective reaction can influence judgements. To do this they used a subliminal priming paradigm where participants were "primed" through exposure to either a smiling face, a frowning face, or a neutral polygon presented at about 1⁄250 of a second. This was considered an amount of time where the nature of the stimuli could not be recalled. Participants were then exposed to an ideograph (e.g. a Chinese character) for two seconds and asked to rate the ideograph on a scale of liking. Researchers found that participants preferred the ideograph preceded with a smiling face as opposed to those preceded by a frowning face or neutral polygon despite the fact that the smiling face was only shown for 1⁄250 of a second. The same experiment demonstrated the persistence of initial affect. During a second session, participations were primed with the same characters, but these characters were preceded by a different face that they were not previously exposed to (e.g. those previously exposed to the smiling face were now exposed to the neutral polygon). Participants continued to show preference for the characters based on the first association, even though the second exposure was preceded by a different affective stimulus. In other words, the second priming was ineffective because the effects of the first priming still remained. If the participant liked a character following exposure to a smiling face, they would continue to like the character even when it was preceded by a frowning face during the second exposure. (The experimental outcome was statistically significant and adjusted for variables such as non-affective preference for certain characters).
=== Insensitivity to numbers === Sometimes affective responses to certain stimuli are a result of a lack of sensitivity to other factors, for example, numbers. Slovic and Peters (2006) did a study on psychophysical numbing, the inability to discriminate change in a physical stimulus as the magnitude of the stimulus increases, and found that students more strongly supported an airport-safety measure that was expected to save a high percentage of 150 lives at risk as opposed to a measure that was expected to save 150 lives. This is thought to have occurred because although saving 150 lives is good, it is somewhat harder to comprehend and thus the decision comes from the positive feeling associated with the higher percentage.
=== The influence of time === Research has been conducted in the influence that time plays in decision-making. In two experiments, Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic and Johnson (2000) studied the affect heuristic under time pressure and the influence that providing risk and benefit information has on the affect heuristic. The researchers compared individuals under no time pressure and those with time pressure. They predicted that individuals under time pressure would rely more heavily on their affect in order to be more efficient in their responses whereas those under no time pressure would use more logic in their decision-making. To do this, university students were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions (time pressure or no time pressure) and one of the two counterbalancing orders (risk judgements followed by benefit judgements or vice versa). They were then given a task in which they had to make judgements about the risk or benefit of certain activities and technologies. As predicted, individuals in the time-pressure condition took less time to make risk judgements than did individuals in the no time pressure condition. In the second experiment, students again had to make judgements about certain activities, but this time were given additional information about the risk and benefits. Information was framed as being high risk, low risk, high benefit or low benefit. The researchers found that this additional information did in fact influence their judgements. Two similar studies were conducted by Wilson and Arvai in 2006, in which they also looked at the affect heuristic affects high and low risk options. These experiments examine the affect heuristic and the “evaluability hypothesis”, the joint evaluation when options are evaluated in a side-by-side comparison and separate evaluation where options are evaluated on their own. They take this concept and discuss how it relates to the affect heuristic by specifically looking at making traits of an option more or less meaningful in terms of the context of choice, more specifically, affect. To examine this relationship more closely, they conducted two experiments where participants received quantitative information about the nature of risks and were placed in one of two groups: affect-poor combined with high risks and affect-rich combined with low risks. In their first study, they looked how the influence of affect on evaluability in joint evaluations as compared to separate evaluations. To this, participants were asked to make choices about the affect-rich problem of crime and the affect-poor problem of deer overpopulation. Participants were asked to rate how they perceived crime and deer overpopulation by rating on a scale from "very good" to "very bad." They found that participants ignored the quantitative information and focused on the affect characteristics.