Feeling Is for Doing: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of Emotions in Economic Behavior

Abstract

Understanding the interaction between reason and passion in economic be-havior has aroused great interest over the ages, and it prompted Jevons(1871/1965), not known to be a feeble mind, to emphasize that “it is fromthe quantitative effects of the feelings that we must estimate their compara-tive effects” (p. 11) on economic and other behavior of relevance. Clearly,making a choice—about a production plant’s location, investment opportu-nity, car, business partner, spouse, or career—is not a purely cold, calculatedcognitive endeavor. On the contrary, these decisions are often fueled by hotemotion. After a long period in which the calls by Jevons and others appearto have been ignored, and attention in theory and research mostly focusedon cognitive, deliberative processes, researchers across disciplines havestarted to look at affective and emotional factors to understand and explainthe behavior of economic agents (for reviews, see Elster, 1998; Kahneman,2003; Loewenstein, 2000). One can now safely say that economic, social,and decision theory recognizes that emotion is a force to be reckoned with.However, there are also two, intimately related emphases in the newfoundinterest in emotions that may hinder the needed further progress of the field:the focus on emotional valence rather than on the specific emotions that de-cision makers experience, and on the focus on informational rather than onthe motivational implications of emotions. We believe that the time is rightto follow up on Jevons’ call for insight into the behavioral implications of thespecific emotions, and the present chapter aims to contribute to this. Spe-cifically, we propose a feeling-is-for-doing approach to the study of emotions,

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