A Study Of Crisis Decision Making Of Individuals: The Role Of Emotions And Decision Maker's Status

Decision is an interdisciplinary research field,which involves economics, management and psychology,etc.When H.Simon found that people's decision is not rational,people began to focus on other factors such as emotions that influence decision.That turns the study of decision from economics-oriented thoughts to psychology-oriented thoughts.From the 1990's,it showed diversity in study trend of decision by psychologists,combining it with other psychology related field,such as emotion,motivation and goals.Crisis decision is a hot topic in current society.The "5.12" Wenchun Earthquake in 2008 increased the critical consciousness significantly.In critical situation,the decision maker has to quickly and decisively make a decision.Crisis decision is a kind of decision that in critical moment,which is a relatively direct and non-procedural decision.There are many factors affecting crisis decision.Emotions, decision maker's status have the natural relationship with crisis decision.However, there are few studies linking the three elements,and almost no experiment study in this aspect.This study,from the view of emotions and decision maker's status,explores the role of these two factors in crisis decision making in order to discover the traits and the mechanism of crisis decision.It will be meaningful to optimize crisis decision making.There are three elements involved in this study,that is,emotions,decision maker's status and critical situation.This study requires participants to face the following situation—in crisis,one should make rational decision,but meanwhile a dilemma problem exists,and furthermore,emotion to the decided objective is also included.The participants are asked to make a decision in the status of player or spectator.How emotions and decision maker's status affects decision making will be discussed.It aims at finding the evidence that these two factors do affect crisis decision making and on different levels of different factors the effectives are different. Through this study,it is hoped to rich the study results in the decision or crisis decision field.In Experiment One,3(emotion)×2(decision maker's status) mixed design is used. And participants are asked to make decisions in some dilemma stories.Emotions are classified by love,hate and neutral as within-subject factors.Decision maker's status are classified by player and spectator as between-subject factors.The same pattern of the dilemma stories are used and according to different experiment conditions six different versions are shown.The participants are required to make decisions based on stories shown at random order.The data are analyzed by Logit model.In Experiment Two,the experimental materials are presented by Software Superlab4.0 at random.The limited reaction time is 5 seconds.3(emotion)×2(decision maker's status) mixed design is used.The experimental materials are the same as that of Experiment One.In order to avoiding the exercise effect,some unrelated decision making stories are added.Then,the true experimental story is shown once when two unrelated ones are shown.The reaction time research pattern is conducted.The data are analyzed by repeated measures.The results show that if the rational decision result is not good for the objective, emotions affect individuals' decision making.In love emotion,it is the most likely to make irrational decision making in the three emotions.In neutral and hate emotions,it shows little possibility to make irrational decision relatively,and these two emotion levels do not show the significant difference.The players are more likely to make irrational decision than the spectators.Furthermore,different emotions make different extent effects on decision making.If the rational decision result is bad for the objective,the reaction time of rational decision making is the longest in love emotion, and shorter in hate and neutral emotions.There are no difference found between hate and neutral emotions.The players' reaction time is longer than the spectators'.The study indicates that the effective rational decision making depends on the decision maker not having any emotion aroused to the objective in critical situations. The decision maker should be avoid to becoming the direct task executor.Only if the decision maker is in objective views and keeps calm,can the best decision be made. The way to be objective and calm is standing in the third-party and maintaining neutral emotion to the objective.The innovative point of this study is that it combines decision maker's status and emotions to study crisis decision making.The experimental designs compose of dilemma story research pattern and the reaction time research pattern.The nonlinear regression model is applied.It focuses on love and hate emotion unlike the former studies involving other aspects of emotions.For further study,more study views of decision maker's status should be shown.The true experimental situation should be presented and more advanced method should be used to design experiments and analyze data.