Wall Street Journal
November 16, 2012
If you’re organizing the funeral of a recently deceased loved one, beware. Sadness makes people more short-sighted when it comes to money, a new paper reports.
In experiments, researchers first primed participants by showing short films known to instill either sadness, disgust or neutral feelings. Then participants were offered choices between immediate sums of money or larger sums they would receive months later.
Faced with such choices—a staple in social science experiments—people typically discount future rewards heavily. But results in this case show that sad people discounted the future much more than people feeling neutral or disgusted. In one experiment, neutral-feeling people required $56 to forgo $85 three months later, but sad people required only $37.
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