Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in a gambling environment people might violate “pre-commitments,” and subsequently bet more than they had initially planned. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon in a scenario where i) participants have full information about the gambles prior to the planning phase ii) the time period between the planning and actual phases of the gambles is very short, iii) participants believed that their plans will be executed, iv) and participants are reminded of their planned bets right before they make their actual bets. In a series of three experiments, we assess the presence, shape and potential processes underlying dynamic inconsistencies in a sequence of two fair gambles.

One's own emotions may influence others' behavior in a given social interaction. If one believes this, s/he has an incentive to game emotions - to strategically conceal a current emotion or display a non-experienced emotion - in an attempt to influence her/his counterpart. In a series of three experiments, we show that people deliberately conceal (experiment 1) or misrepresent (experiments 2 and 3) their emotional state in a negotiation setting. When given the opportunity to either hide or express their current emotions before playing an ultimatum game, receivers who have reported low (vs. high) level of anger are more likely to conceal their emotion right before the proposers decide on the division of the pie (experiment 1). When the procedure allows participants to change their previously reported emotion, receivers choose to inflate their reported level of anger prior to proposers' decision (experiment 2). Finally, this emotion gaming hypothesis generalizes to positive emotions as well. In a standard trust game, trustees inflate the level of happiness before trusters decide on passing vs. keeping a fixed amount of money to the trustees (experiment 3).

The proposed model integrates two streams of research on affect by specifying how evaluative and regulatory mechanisms interact to guide behavior. Two experiments demonstrate that when no mood-changes are expected, the affective evaluation mechanism guides behavior, leading to a monotonic increase in behavioral intentions as affect conditions shift from negative to positive. When participants expect the behavioral activity to change their current affective states, a combination of affect regulation and affective evaluation produces a U shape pattern when a mood-lifting cue is present (experiment 1) and an inverted U shape pattern when a mood-threatening cue is present (experiment 2).