Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Incidental Emotions And Trust Decisions: Visceral Influences On Economic Behavior, Idan Aviv Elmelech

Senior Projects Spring 2014

In recent years, trust has emerged as a key concept in the understanding of cooperation between individuals and organizations. It has been implicated as an important variable in topics ranging from individual decision-making in finance, to macroeconomic growth and stability in developing countries. This thesis employs an experimental design to investigate the impact of emotions on trust behavior. In the experiment, emotion was induced in participants who then played a basic trust game originally proposed by Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe (1995). Results indicate that emotions do impact trust, with anger decreasing trust behavior. However, the data also reveal that individual …