Toward an Affective Science of Resource Allocation: Psychological, Affective, and Neural Factors in Resource Allocation Decisions.

Abstract

We live an environment where access to material goods is cheap, objects are easy to obtain, and we have an ever-increasing number of options to choose from. The field of decision science has advanced with this pattern, providing a greater breadth and depth of research on how and why people make decisions about material goods. However, our pervading desire to acquire things that we do not need and our failure to reallocate goods and money that may be better used by others (e.g., charities) are understudied. This dissertation investigates these processes, the factors that influence our underlying desire to acquire and our disinclination to discard the things that we do not need, using an appraisal framework.

Three chapters investigate how psychological appraisal patterns, affective disorders, and neural indicators are related to resource allocation. In Chapter 2, we manipulated emotions and appraisal dimensions that have previously been associated with acquisitiveness and found that uncertain appraisals were associated with an increased drive to acquire objects. In Chapter 3, we investigated how chronic emotions are associated with acquisition and found that the combination of depression and anxiety, a high-uncertainty state, was associated with increased acquisition of objects generally, and especially less useful objects that people with hoarding disorders prefer. Chapter 4 investigated factors that influence when people will reallocate their own monetary resources to another at a cost to themselves. We found that vulnerability, high arousal/activation, and their combination led to increased donations to charitable causes. These causes were also differentially associated with brain areas that have previously been associated with charitable donations (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, striatum) and motor-motivational regions that have not been hypothesized by prior models (e.g., premotor area, supplementary motor area).

Together, these studies begin to determine the factors that influence resource allocation decisions, including both the acquisition and discarding of resources. Our approach is also one of the first to explore interactions between emotions and appraisal dimensions that tend to be overlooked in the literature but may lead to unpredicted effects and open avenues to continued scholarship in the decision and affective sciences.