Norbert Schwarz - Feelings As Information

Feelings As Information

Norbert Schwarz proposed the ‘feelings-as-information’ hypothesis, one of the most influential explanations for the cognitive consequences of affect. According to this perspective, when people make judgments about a target, they rely upon their feelings as diagnostic information about the target of judgment. Although this generally produces accurate responses, people sometimes make mistakes about the source of this information. This hypothesis is well demonstrated by mood effects where people tend to evaluate various targets more positively when they are in a good mood than in a bad mood. For instance, people report higher life satisfaction when they are in a good mood on a sunny day rather than in a bad mood on a rainy day. However, if the interviewer mentions the weather before they ask the life satisfaction question, this mood effect disappears because people accurately attribute their current mood to the weather rather than their life satisfaction.

In other work from the feelings-as-information perspective, Schwarz suggests that metacognitive experiences, such as the feeling of ease or difficulty in recalling or processing information, can exert significant influence on judgments. In other words, people tend to make judgments based on this interpretation of their subjective feelings of ease or difficulty in information processing. Such feelings can come from a variety of different sources that are irrelevant to a judgment. For example, the feeling of effort can be elicited by contextual features such as the demands of the task (trying to come up with a few versus many exemplars), processing fluency (high or low figure-ground contrast, easy- versus difficult-to-read fonts) and motor movements (brow contraction). Effortful feelings produced by these manipulations can influence judgments about truth, frequency, risk, and beauty: Easy-to-process stimuli are viewed as more accurate, more likely, less risky, and more beautiful.

For instance, his work has shown that people tend to conclude that they are more assertive when they are asked to recall 6 instances of assertive behavior (an easy task), compared to 12 instances of their own assertiveness (a difficult task), even though the people asked to list 12 instances end up generating more examples of assertive behavior. This demonstrates that the meaning of thought content is informed by the experience of thinking about it.

As another example, inferences about familiarity can be drawn from feelings of ease. As a result, when a sentence such as ‘Orsono is a city in Chile,’ is presented in easy-to-read print fonts, people tend to judge it as true more often than when it is presented in hard-to-read print fonts. This effect is presumably driven by people’s inference based on their naïve theory that easily processed statements are likely to have been encountered before, and therefore, are likely to be true.