Does Affect Influence Judgment When Using a Decision Support System?

Many of the current models of decision making in the Decision Support Systems (DSS) literature assume rational actors that make judgments in an emotional vacuum. The empirical investigations of the past three decades in psychology, however, have shown that every day feeling states can influence the thoughts that come to mind and thereby influence a judgment or decision that relies on those thoughts. Although such empirical investigations in psychology have explored the effects of mood in the areas of social behavior and cognition, little work has been done to examine these effects on managerial judgments that use a DSS. In this study, the existing theories of the influence of mood on memory and information processing were employed to expand current theories that investigate the role of DSS on decision making behavior. To do so, the effects of positive and neutral mood on effort and accuracy measures of a judgment that was made using a DSS were compared. The results show that the decision makers who were in a positive mood exhibited a greater degree of effort (used a greater number of informational cues that was provided by the DSS) and made more accurate judgments.