fbpx The Financial Cost of Sadness | Harvard Kennedy School

HKS Affiliated Authors

Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy, Decision Science, and Management

Excerpt

The Financial Cost of Sadness. Jennifer Lerner, November 13, 2012, Paper. “This paper hypothesizes a phenomenon—myopic misery—in which sadness creates a myopic focus on obtaining money now versus later, increasing intertemporal discount rates and thereby producing substantial financial costs. Experiments 1-3 randomly assigned participants to a sad- or neutral-mood condition, and then offered intertemporal choices. Disgust served as a comparison condition in Experiments 1-2. Results revealed that sadness significantly increased impatience: Relative to median neutral-mood participants, median sad-mood participants accepted...” Link