Shared Emotions Foster Tacit Coordination

The current research examines the e ects of discrete emotions on processing style and tacit coordination behavior in a set of canonical choice tasks. We recruited 400 US residents via MTurk to participate in a 2x2 between subjects factorial experiment, in which subjects were randomly assigned to di erent conditions: they were equally divided between positive or negative mood treatments, and between baseline and tacit coordination treatments. Consistently with the socio-cognitive psychology literature, we  nd that participants in the baseline treatment group (no-coordination) are more likely to be a ected by global-processing bias (more likely to choose the global option over local one) if they report a strong positive a ect (as opposed to those who report a strong negative a ect). The behavior pattern changes when the choice is framed as a tacit coordination task. We  nd that the percentage of participants in the coordination condition exhibit a signi cantly lower global-processing bias (caused by emotion of anger) than those in the baseline (no- coordination) condition. These results are consistent with behavioral economic theories proposing that, beyond an intuitive choice, coordination triggers a set of complex mechanisms underlie strategic decision-making, such as probabilistic reasoning required to estimate salience of each choice option (e.g. is `50' a number people choose frequently?), predicting another person's choice reasoning and behavior, as well as social perspective taking. All these processes contribute to increased cognitive load, and weakens the well-documented e ects of emotions on processing strategy and, thus, reducing the global-processing bias. The observed behaviour patterns suggest that discrete emotion e ects on processing strategy is limited in the speci c context of tacit coordination: framing the decision in as a tacit coordination problem alone can be su cient to override the emotion in uence on processing. Due to complex underlying mechanisms needed to solve coordination tasks they increase cognitive load and my lead people to tune into more suitable processing strategies. These new  ndings shed some light on the new paths for further research on a ect, processing style, and tacit coordination.