The Unique Role of Anger among Negative Emotions in Goal-Directed Decision Making

While much of consumer choice is goal-driven, consumers may often fail to prioritize their goals when making decisions. Despite the relevance of goal pursuit to consumer behavior, relatively little work has examined the factors that facilitate goal-directed decision making. In the current research, we examine when and how different negative emotions may influence goal-directed decision making. In six studies, we show that anger leads to greater goal-directed decision making and more goal-consistent choices compared to sadness and fear. As a consequence, anger (but not sadness or fear) may result in both less susceptibility to contextual choice biases and greater post-choice satisfaction. We argue that the results arise because anger is characterized by appraisals of high certainty and high control, whereas both sadness and fear are characterized by appraisals of low certainty and low control.