On Being Happy and Mistaken on a Good Day: Revisiting Forgas’s (1998) Mood-Bias Result

Abstract

Forgas (1998) reported “on being happy and mistaken,” finding that a happy mood increased the fundamental attribution error (FAE) compared to a sad mood. However, the standard attitude-attribution paradigm used by Forgas might contain demand characteristics, to which happy people might be especially susceptible. In addition, Goldenberg and Forgas (2012) showed that a happy mood decreased a form of the FAE. Using the questioner-contestant paradigm, we replicated Forgas’s result, but only when participants were already having a “good day.”

Keywords:

• correspondence bias
• fundamental attribution error
• mood

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel R. Stalder

Daniel R. Stalder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Jessica A. Cook

Jessica A. Cook received a Bachelor’s in Psychology with a Scientist-Practitioner Emphasis at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she is currently an MBA student. This article is based on Jessica A. Cook’s senior thesis.