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Research
In their daily life, people continuously need to make decisions,
Clearly, most decisions take place in a social context, involve emotions, and, because of their self-relevance, shape people's personal and social identities (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). The present research project builds on the notion that decisions can only be understood by taking into account the social and emotional contexts in which they appear.
Historically, classic models of decision making paid little attention to emotional and social factors, thereby limiting their scope and usefulness. It is only recently that researchers directly addressed the impact of emotional and social factors in decision making (e.g. Loewenstein & Lerner, 2002). Fascinating as it may be, this endeavor is still in its infancy with many questions remaining to be explored. Evidently enough, significant progress on this front could be made if one capitalizes on the expertise and resources from a diverse set of disciplines within psychology (e.g., social cognition, clinical psychology, personality psychology, experimental psychopathology) as well as outside psychological sciences (e.g., medical sciences, economics, marketing).
In the present project, we propose to adopt a multidisciplinary perspective in order to investigate the social and emotional factors that influence decision making. This multidisciplinary approach also allows us to broaden the notion of decision making: Whereas this concept has often been confined to marketing or strategic behaviors (e.g. prisoner's dilemma), we extend it to everyday life decisions pertaining to emotional and social behaviors. We are confident that this approach will advance our understanding of the phenomena at work and generate innovative research outcomes. The ambition is to find ourselves at the leading-edge of research on affect and decision making. The questions we chose to address are structured in three themes, all pertaining to contemporary debates in the field: decision making and
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