I'm writing the intro for an APA psychology report, and I'm having a little trouble justifying the hypothesis.
The study was conducted to determine how mood affects a person's ability to think and make decisions.
It is theorized that people in a happy mood will have a tendency for less careful, more cursory thinking. Thus they will use shortcuts, such as heuristics (for example stereotypic evidence), when making decisions. This has been proven through a few previous studies.
In the study, a group of university students were broken into two groups and did a mood induction excercise to put them into either a sad or happy mood (they were given 12 minutes to write about a time when they felt either sad or happy). They thought that this was a study on it's own.
Then another examiner came in and told them he was doing a study about peer evaluation, and asked them to judge a case about another student at another university who was caught cheating on a test. They were given a paper which explained the case, and asked to rate the culprit on a scale of 1 (not guilty) - 10 (most guilty). For half the participants, stereotypical evidence was provided (the culprits name was followed by the phrase "a well-known star athlete"), and for the other half, there was no stereotypical evidence.
The hypothesis that I'm supposed to use for the report is that "When stereotypic information is provided, participants in a happy mood would judge the individual to be more guilty than participants in a sad mood. Conversely, when stereotypic information is absent, participants in a sad mood would judge the individual to be more guilty than participants in a happy mood"
The bolded part is the part that confuses me. I can't think of a reason why those in a sad mood, with no stereotypic evidence, would judge more harshly. It seems like it should be equal to that of a happy person with no sterotypic evidence. Both should be making less biased decisions, regardless of cognition, since there is no information presented which would sway them.
I'm really stuck >.< Does anyone have any ideas?
My current hypothesis is that sad people use just as many shortcuts in their thinking, only that they have a tendancy to automatically disagree with the stereotypic evidence (rather than to agree with it, the way that happy people do). But in this case, both moods with stereotypic evidence absent should be neutral. Sad people should not judge more guilty simply because of a lack of stereotypic evidence.
The only other explanation I can think of is the theory that people in a happy mood will make more positive judgements (i.e. not guilty) than people in a negative mood who would make more negative judgements (guilty). I'm not sure how I would integrate this though, since all of the readings we're supposed to use have disproved this theory.
Any advice or help would be appreciated! Thanks!
I don't take psyc but here's my take on this:
Negative emotions like sadness impair the cognitive process and that's where we make irrational decisions. Not only that, but our priorities change when we are in a bad mood. People who are in a bad mood will make decisions that can change or improve their mood if they were given the opportunity. So maybe rating a culprit higher on the guilt scale would make them better. I would say that having a goal to improve your current mood would have a negative effect on decision making.
Or we could look at it the other way. People in a good mood may just straight out rate the culprit lower on the guilt scale and that the people in a sad mood are rating them normally which ends up being "harsher". But I doubt it, haha
I guess I'm sort of leaning towards the theory that you mentioned. But since your readings disproves that theory, then this probably won't help much lol
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