Daniel Västfjäll

Linköping University | LiU · Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning (IBL)

Research has demonstrated that two types of affect have an influence on judgment and decision making: incidental affect (affect unrelated to a judgment or decision such as a mood) and integral affect (affect that is part of the perceiver’s internal representation of the option or target under consideration). So far, these two lines of research have...

In a great many situations where we are asked to aid persons whose lives are endangered, we are not able to help everyone. What are the emotional and motivational consequences of “not helping all”? In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that negative affect arising from children that could not be helped decreases the warm glow of positive feeli...

Charitable giving in 2013 exceeded $300 billion, but why do we respond to some life-saving causes while ignoring others? In our first two studies, we demonstrated that valuation of lives is associated with affective feelings (self-reported and psychophysiological) and that a decline in compassion may begin with the second endangered life. In Study...

This article reviews research showing that music can alter peoples' moods and emotions. The so called “musical mood induction procedure” (MMIP) relies on music to produce changes in experienced affective processes. The fact that music can have this effect on subjective experience has been utilized to study the effect of mood on cognitive processes...

Rand et al. reported increased cooperation in social dilemmas after forcing individuals to decide quickly. Time pressure was used to induce intuitive decisions, and they concluded that intuition promotes cooperation. We test the robustness of this finding in a series of five experiments involving about 2,500 subjects in three countries. None of the...

This study examines the relationship between respondents’ vaccine hesitancy, reported media consumption patterns, ideological leanings, and trust in science. A large-scale survey conducted in the US in 2022 (N = 1,646) assessed self-reported COVID-19 vaccination, trust in science, and reported media consumption. Findings show that, regardless of pe...

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...

How can people lead fulfilling lives both thanks to and despite the constant use of digital media and artificial intelligence? While the prevailing narrative often portrays these technologies as generally harmful to well-being, the reality is of course more nuanced—some individuals benefit, while others do not. Existing research has predominantly f...

Are religious people more generous than non-religious people? If so, are they more generous in general or mainly to members of their religious ingroup (i.e., parochially generous)? Also, do levels of parochial generosity differ between Christians, Muslims, and atheists? This paper examined these questions by using a novel design of the Dictator Gam...

In a recent special section on Sustainability and Emotion, Schneider and van der Linden present how sustainability science could benefit from affective science to address important unanswered questions about the psychological and affective antecedents of people's engagement in relatively high-impact sustainable behaviors. Here, we underline the imp...

In this commentary, we expand on the special issue themes of applied affective science, ecologically valid data and application, and the need for transdisciplinary collaboration by discussing and exemplifying how affective science can inform behavioral public policy.

In this retrospective honoring the exemplary psychologist Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024), the authors present a curated selection of quotes from the academic community reflecting on his ideas. These submissions, gathered from a wide range of scholars, highlight Kahneman’s contributions to fields spanning attention, judgment, decision-making, and well-...

We explore how financial scarcity affects the strategy people choose to pay off their debts and the role of information avoidance in debt repayment. We conduct an online experiment in the United Kingdom ( N = 1,000) in which people are endowed with multiple debts and given the task to pay off as many debts as possible during 15 rounds. We manipulat...

In shared decision-making (SDM), the role of emotions and information avoidance is crucial yet often overlooked. We highlight three key aspects of how emotions impact medical decision-making that physicians must understand and utilize for SDM to effectively contribute to sense-making: (i) prominence thinking, (ii) risk as feeling versus risk as ana...

In this commentary we expand on the special issue themes of applied affective science, ecologically valid data and application, and the need for transdisciplinary collaboration by discussing and exemplifying how affective science can inform behavioral public policy.

To limit the devastating effects of climate change, individuals need to engage in pro-environmental behaviours. Psychological interventions could be an effective tool for promoting such actions. However, previous work has measured the effectiveness of interventions on self-reported pro-environmental attitudes and neglected impacts on behaviour. Pro...

Introduction: Saving is a journey, beginning with the critical decision to initiate the process, take that pivotal first deposit step, and persistently commit to ongoing savings. However, a lot of saving plans fail already before any deposit is made, and even if the first deposit is made, long-run success of savings is far from guaranteed. In this...

We conducted two studies investigating how financial well-being was affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Across both studies conducted in Sweden, we find that COVID-19 was associated with an overall improvement in subjective financial well-being. The positive effect was driven by a general decline in anxiety toward current financial matters, while fi...

Research on intertemporal and prosocial decisions has largely developed in separate strands of literature. However, many of the decisions we make occur at the intersection of these two dimensions (intertemporal and prosocial). Trust is an example, where a decision today is made with the expectation that another person will reciprocate (or betray) l...

Information ignorance refers to the act of deliberately avoiding, neglecting, or distorting information to uphold a positive self-image and protect our identity-based beliefs. We apply this framework to household finance and develop a concise 12-item questionnaire measuring individuals’ receptiveness to financial information, or the lack thereof –...

This study examines the identifiable victim effect (being more willing to help an identified victim than an unidentified), the singularity effect (i.e., being more willing to help a single identified victim than a group of identified victims), and unit asking (first asking donors for their willingness to donate for one unit and then asking for dona...

When someone violates a social norm, others may think that some sanction would be appropriate. We examine how the experience of emotions like anger and disgust relate to the judged appropriateness of sanctions, in a pre-registered analysis of data from a large-scale study in 56 societies. Across the world, we find that individuals who experience an...

Research on the role of affect in judgment and decision-making has attracted an increasing interest in recent decades. However, most current approaches ignore the temporal dependence of mental states and focus on effects rather than on mechanisms. This effectively leads to an approach of mapping a relatively well-defined, but largely static, feelin...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

We need unparalleled human behavioral changes to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, recent studies suggest that people are not good at identifying mitigative behaviors that are effective in reducing carbon emissions. Thus, even when there is an intention to engage in climate action, people are not necessarily making the most effective...

We need unparalleled human behavioral changes to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, recent studies suggest that people are not good at identifying mitigative behaviors that are relatively more effective in reducing carbon emissions. Thus, even when there is intention to engage in climate action, people are not necessarily making the m...

This article revisits and further investigates the extent to which scope insensitivity in helping contexts can be reduced by the unit asking (UA) method. UA is an intervention that first asks people to help one unit and then asks for willingness to help multiple units. In 3 studies ( N = 3,442), participants took on the role of policymakers to allo...

The biggest benefit of dual-process theory lies in its role as a benchmark theory that, regardless of its empirical plausibility, serves as a starting point for better and more domain-specific models. In this sense, dual-process theory is the Barbapapa of psychological theory - a blob-shaped creature that can be reshaped and adapted to fit in the c...

Previous studies have shed light on the importance of affect in risk perception and the role of mental imagery in generating affect. In the current study, we explore the causal relationship between mental imagery, affect, and risk perception by systematically varying the level of mental imagery in three levels (i.e., enhanced, spontaneous, or preve...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...

The better-than-average effect refers to the tendency to rate oneself as better than the average person on desirable traits and skills. In a classic study, Svenson (1981) asked participants to rate their driving safety and skill compared to other participants in the experiment. Results showed that the majority of participants rated themselves as fa...

Climate change is an increasing problem, with more extreme weather conditions and rising temperatures. To fulfill the temperature goals of the Paris agreement a societal change is needed, a change that requires a shift of lifestyle from all of us. If we want to change our behaviors to more sustainable ones, we need to sacrifice substantial things t...

We present evidence from a pre-registered experiment indicating that a philosophical argument – a type of rational appeal – can persuade people to make charitable donations. The rational appeal we used follows Singer’s “shallow pond” argument (1972), while incorporating an evolutionary debunking argument (Paxton, Ungar and Greene, 2012) against fav...

People often choose the option that is better on the most subjectively prominent attribute-the prominence effect. We studied the effect of prominence in health care priority setting and hypothesized that values related to health would trump values related to costs in treatment choices, even when individuals themselves evaluated different treatment...

Previous studies show that spending money on others makes people happier than spending it on themselves. The present study tested and extended this idea by examining the role of active versus passive choice and default choices. Here, 788 participants played and won money in a game, from which some of the earnings could be donated to charity. Partic...

People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, yet their behavior often increases others’ health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the Covid-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts oth...

Moral spillover occurs when a morally loaded behavior becomes associated with another source. In the current paper, we addressed whether the moral motive behind causing CO2 emissions spills over on how much people think is needed to compensate for the emissions. Reforestation (planting trees) is a common carbon-offset technique. With this in mind,...

Background Religion is an important ingroup characteristic for many people. For different reasons, people with different religious affiliations might prefer members of their religious outgroup. Previous studies have investigated perceptions of and behaviour toward religious ingroup and outgroup members in various contexts. The four studies presente...

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnessed a partisan segregation of beliefs toward the global health crisis and its management. Politically motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret information in accordance with individual motives to protect valued beliefs rather than objectively considering the facts, could represent a key...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, media and policymakers openly speculated about the number of immune citizens needed to reach a herd immunity threshold. What are the effects of such numerical goals on the willingness to vaccinate? In a large representative sample (N = 1540) of unvaccinated Swedish citizens, we find that giving a low (60%) compared...

Compassion collapse is a phenomenon where feelings and helping behavior decrease as the number of needy increases. But what are the underlying mechanisms for compassion collapse? Previous research has attempted to pit two explanations: Limitations of the feeling system vs. motivated down-regulation of emotion, against each other. In this article, w...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

Affective experience has an important role in decision-making with recent theories suggesting a modulatory role of affect in ongoing subjective value computations. However, it is unclear how varying expectations and uncertainty dynamically influence affective experience and how dynamic representation of affect modulates risky choices. Using hierarc...

The better-than-average effect refers to the tendency to rate oneself as better than the average person on desirable traits and skills. In a classic study, Svenson (1981) asked participants to rate their driving safety and skill compared to other participants in the experiment. Results showed that the majority of participants rated themselves as fa...

Did the outbreak of COVID‐19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish—a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swe...

What is the effect of seemingly impressive verbal financial assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually meaningless; that is, financial pseudo-profound bullshit? We develop and validate a novel measurement scale to assess consumers’ ability to detect and distinguish financial bullshit. We show that this financial bullshit...

We study the effects of experimental manipulation of decision mode (rational "brain" vs. affective "heart") and individual difference in processing styles (intuition vs. deliberation) on prosocial behavior. In a survey experiment with a diverse sample of the Swedish population (n = 1,828), we elicited the individuals' processing style and we experi...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for polic...

Can deliberation increase charitable giving when giving is impulsive (i.e., a one-time small gift in response to an immediate appeal)? We conduct two studies in Israel and Sweden to compare two forms of deliberation, unguided and guided, in their ability to decrease the singularity effect (i.e., giving more to one than many victims), often evident...

Are people more likely to (mis)interpret information so that it aligns with their ideological identity when relying on feelings compared to when engaging in analytical thinking? Or is it the other way around: Does deliberation increase the propensity to (mis)interpret information to confirm existing political views? In a behavioral experiment, part...

Affect is a continuous and temporally dependent process that represents an individual's ongoing relationship with its environment. However, there is a lack of evidence on how factors defining the dynamic sensory environment modulate changes in momentary affective experience. Here, we show that goal-dependent relevance of stimuli is a key factor sha...

Understanding why women display less financial literacy than men is crucial for developing policies to reduce gender inequalities and improve women's financial behavior. In a series of studies, we investigate whether the observed gender gap in financial literacy can be identified in nonnumerical contexts, if it can be related to confidence in finan...

Is the identifiable victim effect (IVE; helping a single identified victim more than a statistical victim) stronger for child victims than adult victims? In this paper, we test the effect of identifying a victim and whether that victim is a child or adult on helping motivation and donation behaviors. In three studies (N = 1508) with different sampl...

Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, media and policy makers have speculated about herd immunity and the threshold for numbers of immune citizens needed for reaching it. What are the effects of such numerical goals on willingness to vaccinate? In a large representative sample of unvaccinated Swedes we find that giving a low (60%) compared...

This study investigated the neural correlates of the so-called affect heuristic, which refers to the phenomenon whereby individuals tend to rely on affective states rather than rational deliberation of utility and probabilities during judgments of risk and utility of a given event or scenario. The study sought to explore whether there are shared re...

Affective experience has an important role in decision-making with recent theories suggesting a modulatory role of affect in ongoing subjective value computations. However, it is unclear how varying expectations and uncertainty dynamically influence affective experience and how dynamic representation of affect modulates risky choices. Using hierarc...

Motivated numeracy refers to the idea that people with high reasoning capacity will use that capacity selectively to process information in a manner that protects their own valued beliefs. This concept was introduced in a now classic article by Kahan, Peters, Dawson, & Slovic [2017, Behavioral Public Policy 1, 54–86], who used numeracy to index rea...

Outcome editing refers to a set of mental rules that people apply when deciding whether to evaluate multiple outcomes jointly or separately, which subsequently affects choice. In a large-scale online survey (n=2062) we investigate whether individuals use the same outcome editing rules for financial outcomes (e.g., a lottery win) and social outcomes...

We investigate the antecedents of subjective financial well-being and general well-being during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In an online survey conducted in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic with over 1000 Swedish participants we found that distrust in the government to cope with financial (but not healthcare) challenges of the pandemic was negativ...

Knowing the descriptive norm concerning others' prosociality could affect your behavior, but would you seek out or avoid such knowledge? This high‐powered preregistered experiment explores the effect of both forced and optionally revealed descriptive norms on real monetary donations. These norms were established by learning the proportion of previo...

Decision-making competence is a skill that is associated with numerous positive life outcomes. Even though multiple cognitive abilities have been shown to predict decision-making competence, few studies have incorporated a large test battery tapping into several cognitive abilities concurrently in the same models. The current paper presents a study...