Emotion and economic decision in the ultimatum game (In French)

We study the impact of induced positive or negative emotions on economic decisions in a negotiation context. Decision was assessed with a well studied social task, the Ultimatum game. In this task, subjects had to make decisions to either accept or reject fair or unfair offers from other players. Emotion was induced with short movie clips. Our results show that participants induced with negative emotions (such as anger or indignation) reject significantly more unfair offers than subjects induced with positive emotions (such as joy or elation). These results demonstrate that even subtle emotions can play an important role in biasing decision making.