کنشگران عاقل یا احمق های عاقل:مفاهیم اثر ابتکاری برای اقتصاد رفتاری

This paper describes two fundamental modes of thinking. The experiential mode, is intuitive, automatic, natural, and based upon images to which positive and negative affective feelings have been attached through learning and experience. The other mode is analytic, deliberative, and reason based. I describe recent empirical research illuminating “the affect heuristic” wherein people rapidly consult their affective feelings, when making judgments and decisions. This heuristic enables us to be rational actors in many situations. It works beautifully when experience enables us to anticipate accurately how we will like or dislike the consequences of our decisions. However, it fails miserably when the consequences turn out to be much different than we anticipated. In the latter circumstances, the rational actor may well become the rational fool.

This paper introduces a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of “goodness” or “badness” (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses occur rapidly and automatically—note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the stimulus word “treasure” or the word “hate.” I shall argue that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as “the affect heuristic.” I will attempt to trace briefly the development of the affect heuristic across a variety of research paths followed by my colleagues and many others. I shall also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts our daily lives.

I hope that this rather selective and idiosyncratic tour through a multitude of experiments and conjectures has conveyed the sense of excitement many behavioral researchers now feel toward the role of affect in judgment and decision making. The affect heuristic appears at once both wondrous and frightening: wondrous in its speed, and subtlety, and sophistication, and its ability to “lubricate reason”; frightening in its dependency upon context and experience, allowing us to be led astray or manipulated—inadvertently or intentionally—silently and invisibly. It is sobering to contemplate how elusive meaning is, due to its dependence upon affect. Thus, the forms of meaning that we take for granted and upon which we justify immense effort and expense toward gathering and disseminating “meaningful” information, may be illusory. Thus, for example, we cannot assume that an intelligent person can understand the meaning of and properly act upon even the most basic of numbers such as amounts of money or numbers of human lives, not to mention more esoteric measures or statistics, unless these numbers are infused with affect. Contemplating the workings of the affect heuristic helps us appreciate Damasio’s (1994) contention that rationality is not only a product of the analytical mind, but of the experiential mind as well. Under the right conditions, the perception and integration of affective feelings, within the experiential system, appears close to the sophisticated maximization process postulated by economic theories since the days of Jeremy Bentham. These feelings form the neural and psychological substrate of utility. In this sense, the affect heuristic enables us to be rational actors in many important situations. But not in all situations. It works beautifully when our experience enables us to anticipate accurately how we will like the consequences of our decisions. It fails miserably when the consequences turn out to be much different in character than we expected. In the latter circumstances, the rational actor becomes, to borrow the words of Amartya Sen (1977), the rational fool.