The Influence Of Emotions And Cognitive Styles On Advice Taking

Advice taking is the hotspot of current research of behavioral decision making. Itmainly explores the mechanism of other’s advice to individual decision process andhow judges change the initial opinion to form the final decision after receiving other’sadvice. The judge-advisor system is the classical paradigm of advice-taking research.Researchers focus on the influence of judge factors, advisors factors and the taskfactors on advice taking in this paradigm.From the judge factors, their mood conditions will have a certain impact on thelevel of advice taking. Moods have an effect on people’s cognition, judgment andsocial behavior widely. Therefore the advice taking decision-making process is notentirely rational. It also affected by some emotional experience. Hastie pointed outthat the effect of emotion on decision-making is one of the16important problemsneed to be solved in the future research of decision. However Damasio believed thatthe impact of emotion on individual judgments and decisions depended on the taskcharacteristics, individual characteristics and their interaction. As an importantpersonality, cognitive styles significantly affect individual’s cognitive process and thedecision-making behavior. Therefore, it is necessary to explores how people’semotions and cognitive styles affect their advice taking.Two experiments were designed to explore the influence of emotions andcognitive styles on people’s advice taking in the selection task and estimation taskwith the classic JAS paradigm in this study. There are176college students took partin study1to finish the selection task.168college students took part in experiment2to finish the estimation task. Independent variables were moods (happiness, anger),cognitive styles (field-independent cognitive style, field-dependent cognitive style)and gender (male, female). Dependent variable of the two experiments was the levelof advice taking.The results showed that:(1) In both selection task and estimation task, moods significantly influenced thelevel of individual’s advice taking. And the subjects with happiness were more likelyto accept other’s advice than the angry subjects.(2) In both selection task and estimation task, cognitive styles significantlyinfluenced the level of individual’s advice taking. Field-dependent subjects were more likely to accept other’s advice than the field-independent subjects.(3) In both selection task and estimation task, gender significantly influenced thelevel of individual’s advice taking. Females were more likely to accept other’s advicethan males.(4) In the estimation task, there was significant interaction between moods andcognitive styles. Field-dependent subjects were more likely to accept other’s advicethan the field-independent subjects when they experienced pleasant emotion, but therewas no significant difference of cognitive styles in the level of advice taking whensubjects experienced angry.