Mood Heuristic
When assessing happiness, people often substitute an emotionally charged answer from a related question (e.g., about dating) for a thoughtful evaluation of overall life satisfaction, leading to biased judgments.
THE IDEA
THE MOOD HEURISTIC FOR HAPPINESS
A survey of German students is one of the best examples of substitution. The survey that the young participants completed included the following two questions:
How happy are you these days?
How many dates did you have last month?
The experimenters were interested in the correlation between the two answers. Would the students who reported many dates say that they were happier than those with fewer dates? Surprisingly, no: the correlation between the answers was about zero. Evidently, dating was not what came first to the students’ minds when they were asked to assess their happiness. Another group of students saw the same two questions, but in reverse order:
How many dates did you have last month?
How happy are you these days?
The results this time were completely different. In this sequence, the correlation between the number of dates and reported happiness was about as high as correlations between psychological measures can get. What happened?
The explanation is straightforward, and it is a good example of substitution. Dating was apparently not the center of these students’ life (in the first survey, happiness and dating were uncorrelated), but when they were asked to think about their romantic life, they certainly had an emotional reaction. The students who had many dates were reminded of a happy aspect of their life, while those who had none were reminded of loneliness and rejection. The emotion aroused by the dating question was still on everyone’s mind when the query about general happiness came up.
The psychology of what happened is precisely analogous to the psychology of the size illusion in figure 9. “Happiness these days” is not a natural or an easy assessment. A good answer requires a fair amount of thinking. However, the students who had just been asked about their dating did not need to think hard because they already had in their mind an answer to a related question: how happy they were with their love life. They substituted the question to which they had a ready-made answer for the question they were asked.
Here again, as we did for the illusion, we can ask: Are the students confused? Do they really think that the two questions—the one they were asked and the one they answer—are synonymous? Of course not. The students do not temporarily lose their ability to distinguish romantic life from life as a whole. If asked about the two concepts, they would say they are different. But they were not asked whether the concepts are different. They were asked how happy they were, and System 1 has a ready answer.
Dating is not unique. The same pattern is found if a question about the students’ relations with their parents or about their finances immediately precedes the question about general happiness. In both cases, satisfaction in the particular domain dominates happiness reports. Any emotionally significant question that alters a person’s mood will have the same effect. WYSIATI. The present state of mind looms very large when people evaluate their happiness.
When to use it
When conducting customer satisfaction surveys, avoid preceding general satisfaction questions with specific emotional questions.
In negotiations, be aware that your mood from a previous event can color your perception of the current offer.
In personal decision-making, take a break and reset your emotional state before making important judgments.
In advertising, evoke positive emotions before presenting product benefits to leverage the mood heuristic.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Dating and Happiness Survey
German students were asked two questions: 'How happy are you these days?' and 'How many dates did you have last month?' When the happiness question came first, there was no correlation between number of dates and happiness. But when the dating question came first, a strong correlation emerged, showing that the emotional reaction to the dating question influenced the subsequent happiness assessment.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think of a recent decision you made. Was it influenced by your current mood rather than a thorough evaluation? How might that have affected the outcome?
In what situations might you intentionally order questions to influence someone's judgment?
How can you design a survey to avoid mood heuristic effects when measuring subjective well-being?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)