Joint presentation reduces the effect of emotion on evaluation of public actions

Abstract

In four experiments conducted on the world wide web, subjects evaluated the priority of policies presented separately or presented jointly in pairs, and/or reported their emotional responses to the problem that each policy addressed. Strength of emotional responses was more strongly related to priority when policies were presented separately than when they were presented jointly. We found evidence for one mechanism that could produce these results: joint presentation increases the evaluability of the policies, thus increasing the influence of cognitive evaluations of importance on priority judgements, and reducing the relative influence of emotional responses. We also found evidence that importance can affect emotional responses. We found no evidence for other mechanisms in which the emotions evoked by one item spread to the other item in joint presentation. The role of evaluability points to the applied value of evaluating policies in the context of alternatives.

Keywords:

• Evaluability
• Emotion
• Importance
• Public policy
• Judgement

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by agrant from theU.S.–Isreal Bi-national Science Foundation.

Notes

¹This result was significant when the categories in each pair were human/nature, nature/human, or the same. Thus, it did not apparently result from the effect of contrasting different types of problems, which led to the reversals of the sort described by Ritov and Kahneman.

²The result is unlikely to be due to an order effect resulting from the most important member being presented second. When the two items in a pair were rated equally important in separate presentation in Part 2, the second item was given slightly higher priority in joint presentation; a mean of .08, where 1 is a step on the response scale. This was not significant of course.

³We found little evidence for increases or decreases in emotion resulting from joint presentation itself. In Experiment 1, “yes” responses to emotion questions were 52% in separate and 54% in joint in Part 1; 55% in separate and 56% in joint in Part 2. (SDs of subject means ranged from 22% to 24%.) In Experiment 2, the mean emotion responses were 4.5 on the 7-point scale for both single and joint judgements. In Experiment 3, the mean emotion score (out of 6, with the lowest response counted as zero) was 3.52 for the separate items and 3.59 for the joint items, a small but significant difference, t(104)=2.58, p=.0114.

⁴The joint-evaluation versions with the two items from the same category—human or environmental—were done a few months after the others, but in the same way and to subjects drawn from the same population.

⁵In an additional experiment, we found that reversals also occur in a ranking task, in which subjects ranked several proposals. The ranking task, like joint presentation, reduced the effect of emotion, so that items with strong emotional responses tended to be ranked lower than their separate-presentation priority ratings would imply.