A influência de imagens emocionais na dilatação pupilar e na tomada de decisão econômica intertemporal

Abstract

The traditional theory of finance, for a long time, has been considered as absolutely correct. The traditional thought originated from the economy, which suggests that people make decisions in a strictly rational way in the ordinary economic choices. Contrary to this, at present, in Behavioral Economics, it is known that decisions are not made by humans with total rationality. Emotional stimuli by images, then, were inserted to detect possible interference in decisions. The present study used 3 sets of emotional images: positive, negative and neutral, previously presented to different volunteers and displayed to determine the relationship between emotional images, the respective pupil responses, and inter-temporal economic choices. In which the first question deals with receiving wages in ascending or descending order over 6 years. The second question refers to the minimum required amount to be worth a 1- month wait and for a 1-year wait to receive R$ 1,000.00 earned and the third question concerns a hosting earned to enjoy in 1 month. in a 3-star hotel, or, in 1 year, in a 5-star hotel There is evidence that the positive and negative images provided greater pupillary dilation in relation to its baseline. For the first and three intertemporal economic questions, no interference from emotional stimuli in the choices was observed, with only about half of the volunteers opting for a choice that provides the greatest gain, regardless of the stimulus to which they were previously induced. This indicates that the emotional stimulus, although proven to be absorbed by the volunteers through the measurement of pupillary dilation, was not decisive to interfere in the intertemporal choice of these two questions (1 and 3), as they supported incoherent choices regardless of the type of stimulus. In question 2, it was observed that when faced with a discount from the near (1 month) and distant (1 year) future, they made decisions inconsistent with the economic logic, since the averages of the results of the Future Discount 1 (DF1) and Discount of the Future 2 (DF2) were 0.5170 for 1 year and 0.1987 for 1 month annualized. Thus, the theory assumes that DF1 is equal to DF2. This study is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to relate the interference of the emotional state, measured by a type of biosignal, to intertemporal economic decisions