Washington, Oct 21 (ANI): A new study has claimed that passing moods and deeply embedded human impulses can influence us while making "rational decisions".
According to Arizona State University researchers, our economic decisions change radically when either survival or reproduction is on our minds.
The study shows that loss aversion waxes and wanes in flexible ways, depending on whether or not the person is experiencing different fundamental motivational states, such as self-protection or looking for a mate.
The research was conducted by a team led by ASU professor Douglas Kenrick, who was joined by Jessica Li, an ASU doctoral student, Vlad Griskevicius, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota and Steven Neuberg, who, along with Kenrick, heads up ASU's Evolution and Social Cognition lab.
For the study, the research participants were asked how happy or unhappy would it make them to gain or lose 100 dollars, or to experience a 30-percentile boost in their financial assets.
As in previous researches, losses typically loomed slightly larger than gains, which changed for participants who answered the questions after imagining themselves having a romantic encounter with someone they found highly attractive.
"For men in a mating frame of mind, loss aversion completely disappeared and they became more focused on wins than losses," Li, the first author of the study, said.
On the other hand, for women mating motivation led them to be even more loss averse, to focus less on possible gains and even more on the pain of loss.
The study, which is a part of three studies that will appear in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, has been released online by the American Psychological Association. (ANI)
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