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When making economic decisions, humans can be driven by various factors, including their goals and emotions. Past studies have hypothesized that emotions play a crucial role in economic decisions, particularly those that involve risk or trade-offs between immediate and future benefits.

Researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University and University of Chicago Booth School of Business recently set out to investigate the relationship between emotions and economic choices in greater depth by analyzing a large multi-national dataset.

Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, unveiled distinct patterns in the extent to which emotions predict economic decisions across several countries worldwide.

"In 2019, we encountered a new dataset that measured how individuals make financial decisions around the globe," Samuel Pertl, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. "We were fascinated by this dataset, and as we delved deeper, we discovered an additional layer of information that the original research team had not explored: participants' emotional experiences.

"This aspect intrigued us because most prior research on the influence of emotions on decision-making has been conducted in a few highly developed countries, primarily the U.S. With nationally representative samples from 74 countries, we saw an opportunity to test whether the relationship between emotions and economic decision-making replicates and generalizes on a global scale."

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