Running head: Mood and Morality Affective influences on moral decisions: Mood effects on selfishness vs fairness

Treating others fairly and equitably is a basic requirement for moral behaviour, yet in many everyday situations the impulse to be selfish and benefit ourselves at the expense of others remains a powerful motive. This chapter reports five experiments investigating the influence of positive and negative affect on moral decisions involving the allocation of resources to ourselves vs others, using strategic games such as the dictator game and the ultimatum game. In the dictator game, proposers have unconstrained power to be selfish, and the option of being fair to others is entirely voluntarily. In the ultimatum game, allocation decisions to self vs others require more sophisticated processing as they are subject to the veto power of recipients. All five experiments found that negative mood consistently increased, and positive mood reduced moral behaviour and concern with fairness. Allocators in a negative mood were consistently more fair and gave more resources to a partner than did those in a positive mood. These decisions also took longer to make, confirming moodinduced processing differences in moral decisions. The results are discussed in terms recent affect-cognition theories, suggesting that positive affect recruits a more assimilative, internally focused processing style promoting greater selfishness, while negative affect induces more externally oriented, accommodative thinking and greater concern fairness and external moral norms. The implications of the findings for everyday interpersonal behaviors and interactions involving selfishness versus fairness are considered.