Affect heuristic was a Social sciences and society good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result April 27, 2012 Good article nominee Not listed

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The definition of heuristic refers to attention and consciousness. The use of the term heuristic in this article seems to imply unconscious operation. Somethings got to give. DCDuring 03:07, 30 September 2007 (UTC) reply

Corrected and edited Heuristics article, with effect of resolving contradiction. DCDuring 04:50, 30 September 2007 (UTC) reply

Articles that I am considering discussing that are in relationship to the affect heuristic:

Averbeck, J., Jones, A., & Robertson, K. (2011). Prior Knowledge and Health Messages: An Examination of Affect as Heuristics and Information as Systematic Processing for Fear Appeals. Southern Communication Journal, 76(1), 35-54. In this article, researchers used an affective attitude scale, derogation scale, behavior scale, efficacy scale and a multiple choice test to test how prior knowledge affects certain health-related issues Researchers found that individuals who had prior knowledge in a certain subject exhibited less fear and were least likely to fall prey to the affect heuristic and individuals that did not have prior knowledge exhibited more fear and were more likely — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shannonmari ( talk • contribs) 00:03, 21 March 2012 (UTC) reply

Dohle, S., Keller, C., Seigrist, M. (2010). Examining the relationship between affect and implicit associations: Implications for risk perception. Risk Analysis, 30(7), 1116-1128. This study looks at the affect heuristic and gambling. Researchers had two conditions: a simple gamble which was 7/36 to win $9, otherwise they would win nothing or a simple loss which was 7/36 or lose $0.05. They found that the $9 evoked neutral feelings as compared to the group that was told that they would win nothing. The attractiveness of the “no loss” gamble condition was driven by negative feelings due to the low probability of winning and thus the $9 was seen in a more positive light when paired with 5 cents loss. This study demonstrates that affect give additional meaning to information and thus helps with decision making. This falls under the "Experimental Findings" section.

Leiserowitz, A. (2006). Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values. Climate Change, "77"(2), 45-72.

In this experiment, researchers looked at the affect heuristic in terms of affective images related to climate change. I want to use this particular article under the “Experimental Findings” section in order to contribute another perspective of the affect heuristic and risk perception as it pertains to climate change.

Lench, H. C. (2009). Automatic optimism: The affective basis of judgments about the likelihood of future events. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 138(2), 187-200.

This study looks at the affect heuristic and desirability bias. More specifically, people tend to judge that the future will be consistent with their desires and researchers set out to find out why this is by examining whether affective reactions associated with future events are the method through which our desires influence our judgment. This could either go under “Experimental Findings” or I could devote a section to “Desirability” alone.

Martino, B., Kumaran, D., Seymour, B., & Dolan, R. J. (2006). Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain. Science 313(5787), 684-687.

This study looks at the affect heuristic and how it relates to the framing effect. The researchers hypothesize become susceptible to the framing effect due to emotional processes, in particular, the affect heuristic. They found that the framing bias is reflected by an affect heuristic causing individuals to incorporate additional emotional information into their judgment and decision making. This could either go under “Experimental Findings” or a section dedicated to “Decision Making.”

Shanteau, J. (1989). Cognitive Heuristics and Biases in Behavioral Auditing: Review, Comments and Observations. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 1(4), 165-177. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shannonmari ( talk • contribs) 00:53, 21 March 2012 (UTC) reply

This article provides background on heuristics and how it affects decision making starting with Tversky and Kahneman who did research on cognitive heuristics in the 1970s. They also discuss some of the issues and criticisms that have been discussed within psychology in terms of the research that has been conducted on this issue. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shannonmari ( talk • contribs) 01:01, 21 March 2012 (UTC) reply

Siegrists, M. & Gutscher, H. (2006). The Role of Affect and Availability Heuristics in Risk Analysis. Risk Analysis, 26(3), 631-639.

This study looks at the role that the affect heuristic plays in risk perception in three different experiments and found that the affect heuristic is important for successful risk communication due to the fact that feelings play an important role in how people perceive risk.

Slovic, P. & Peters, E. (2006). Risk Perception and Affect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(6), 322-325.

This article is similar to the other articles in the sense that it confirms that the affect heuristic plays an important role in risk perception, but looks specifically at the development of the affect heuristic and goes into depth about some if the key ways that it impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk. It even discusses innumeracy and our “insensitivity” to numbers. I’m considering putting it under a section that specifically talks reasons researchers have come up with as to why the affect heuristic plays such a big role.

Slovic, P., Finucane, M. L., Peters, E., MacGregor, D.G. (2004). Risk as Analysis and Risk as Feelings: Some Thoughts about Affect, Reason, Risk and Rationality. Risk Analysis 24(2), 311-322.

This article looks at the affect heuristic and how it influences two types of thinking, experimental system and analytic system. The “experimental system” is considered to be intuitive and automatic, in other words, unaccessible to conscious awareness. The “analytic system” uses algorithms and other rules and logic to comprehend risk and requires conscious control. In other words, these two systems constitute the “Head” and “Gut”. This study could be used for more of the background of affect under the “Concept” section.

Wilson, R. S. & Arvai, J. L. When Less Is More: How Affect Influences Preferences When Comparing Low and High-risk Options. Journal of Risk Research, 9(2), 165-178.

This article talks about the affect heuristic and the “evaluability hypothesis” which looks at joint evaluation when options are evaluated in a side-by-side comparison and separate evaluation where options are evaluated on their own. They take this idea and discuss the relationship between evaluability by specifically looking at making traits of an option more or less meaningful in terms of the context of choice, more specifically, affect. They conducted two experiments where participants received quantitative information about the nature of risks and were placed in one of two groups: affect-poor combined with high risks and affect-rich combined with low risks. They found that participants ignored the quantitative information and focused on the affect characteristics which further proves the affect heuristic. This could go under “Experimental Findings.”

Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences. American Psychologist, 35(2), 151-175.

This article also gives a more general overview of affect heuristic as well as looking at the differences between decisions that are made based on affect and decisions made based on conscious cognitive processing. The researcher finds that affect and cognition should be considered separate (similar to the argument made by Slovic et al 2004), but looks into how they influence one another as well as act independently of one another in terms of how individuals process information. This would go under the “Concept” section.

Shannonmari (
talk) 05:13, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
reply

The first bullet under 'further reading' ("Slovic, Paul; Melissa Finucane; Ellen Peters; Donald G. MacGregor (2014)") does not exist, it apparently refers to an article from 2004, reprinted in 2007:

Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E., & MacGregor, D. G. (2002). The affect heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (p. 397–420). Cambridge University Press.

"The Affect Heuristic" Slovic, Paul & Finucane, Melissa & Peters, Ellen & MacGregor, Donald. (2002). The affect heuristic. Reprinted by European Journal of Operational Research. European Journal of Operational Research 177 (2007) 1333–1352.

The doi refers to another article, indeed from 2014: "The affect heuristic, mortality salience, and risk: Domain‐specific effects of a natural disaster on risk‐benefit perception", Daniel Västfjäll Ellen Peters Paul Slovic. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Volume55, Issue6 December 2014 Pages 527-532

I was looking for the most recent article, and ended up confused (and having to read 20 instead of 5 pages ;-)) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Niccienic ( talk • contribs) 09:40, 20 January 2021 (UTC) reply