G. Hertel et al., Mood effects on cooperation in small groups: Does positive mood simply lead to more cooperation?, COGNIT EMOT, 14(4), 2000, pp. 441-472
The hypothesis that happy persons are more cooperative than sad persons has
become a popular presumption in social and applied psychology However, emp
irical evidence for this notion is less clear than often assumed. We argue
that mood affects the process of decision making rather than (or in additio
n to) affecting the level of cooperation, increasing heuristic processing w
hen persons feel good or secure, but leading to more systematic processing
when persons feel sad or insecure. As a consequence, feeling states should
moderate persons' reactions to heuristic cues, as for example the expected
or perceived behaviour of others. Two experiments are reported varying feel
ing states, descriptive social norms, and the perceived behaviour of other
group members in a chicken dilemma game. As expected, happy (Experiment 1)
or secure participants (Experiment 2) showed shorter decision latencies and
heuristically imitated others' behaviour in the chicken dilemma, whereas s
ad or insecure participants exhibited more systematic and rational behaviou
r, tending to defect when others' cooperation was high, but to increase the
ir investment for the common when others' cooperation was low. No main effe
ct of mood on cooperation occurred in either experiment.