Affect Heuristic

The affect heuristic is a mental shortcut in which a person's current emotional reaction, such as fear, pleasure or surprise, influences their decisions and judgments, sometimes summarized as going with your gut. Robert Zajonc argued in 1980 that an affective reaction to something is typically the first, most automatic response a person has to it, and that this reaction then shapes how the person subsequently processes and evaluates the information. Melissa Finucane, Ali Alhakami, Paul Slovic and Stephen Johnson proposed in 2000 that this works by linking risk and benefit judgments to a single underlying feeling: something that produces a positive feeling tends to be judged as both lower in risk and higher in benefit, and something that produces a negative feeling tends to be judged the opposite way, even in cases where risk and benefit should logically be assessed independently of one another. The affect heuristic demonstrates that everyday judgments often rest as much on emotional association with a stimulus as on any deliberate weighing of evidence.