Blinded by anger or feeling the love: How emotions influence advice taking.

Abstract

Across 2 experiments, the authors demonstrate that emotional states influence how receptive people are to advice. The focus of these experiments is on incidental emotions, emotions triggered by a prior experience that is irrelevant to the current situation. The authors demonstrate that people who feel incidental gratitude are more trusting and more receptive to advice than are people in a neutral emotional state, and people in a neutral state are more trusting and more receptive to advice than are people who feel incidental anger. In these experiments, greater receptivity to advice increased judgment accuracy. People who felt incidental gratitude were more accurate than were people in a neutral state, and people in a neutral state were more accurate than were people who felt incidental anger. The results offer insight into how people use advice, and the authors identify conditions under which leaders, policy makers, and advisors may be particularly influential.

Anxiety, Advice, and the Ability to Discern: Feeling Anxious Motivates Individuals to Seek and Use Advice

“…In the anger condition, participants watched a video clip from the movie My Bodyguard that portrays a man being treated unfairly. This video clip has been effectively used in prior research to induce incidental anger (Gino & Schweitzer, 2008). Consistent with this design change, we added three additional emotions to assess anger (i.e., angry, mad, and furious, =.84) in the measure of subjective feelings participants completed at the end of the study.…”

“…In this segment of the experiment, we randomly assigned participants to watch either an anxiety-inducing clip from the movie Vertical Limit about a mountain-climbing accident or a neutral clip from a National Geographic documentary about fish in the Great Barrier Reef. Both video clips have been used in prior emotion research to induce anxiety and neutral feelings (e.g., Brooks & Schweitzer, 2011;Frederickson & Branigan, 2005;Gino & Schweitzer, 2008;Gross & Levenson, 1995).…”

“…For example, individuals weigh advice more heavily when the task is difficult than when it is easy (Gino & Moore, 2007) and when advice is costly to obtain than when it is free (Gino, 2008;Patt, Bowles, & Cash, 2006). Third, aspects of the decision maker's internal state impact how receptive individuals are to advice, such as the decision maker's confidence (Cooper, 1991) and emotional state (e.g., Gino & Schweitzer, 2008).…”

Anxiety, advice, and the ability to discern: Feeling anxious motivates individuals to seek and use advice.

“…In this segment of the experiment, we randomly assigned participants to watch either an anxiety-inducing clip from the movie Vertical Limit, about a mountain-climbing accident, or a neutral clip from a National Geographic documentary about fish in the Great Barrier Reef. Both video clips have been used in prior emotion research to induce anxiety and neutral feelings (e.g., Brooks & Schweitzer, 2011;Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005;Gino & Schweitzer, 2008;Gross & Levenson, 1995).…”

“…Third, aspects of the decision maker's internal state impact how receptive individuals are to advice, such as the decision maker's confidence (Cooper, 1991) and emotional state (e.g., Gino & Schweitzer, 2008).…”