Does a Good Mood Make Prices Look Fair
A good mood lowers how closely people check what they are told, and it has not been shown to raise what they will pay. None of the studies found asked shoppers whether a price was fair.
Answer to the question
Why does a good mood make a price look fair?
It may not make the price look fairer so much as get it checked less. In a 1990 study people in a good mood were swayed by weak arguments as readily as strong ones, and a 2016 study found negative emotions raised rejection of unfair offers while happiness did not. No study found tested price fairness directly.
Key takeaways
- Gerald Gorn and colleagues found in 1993 that people in a good mood rated stereo speakers more favourably, unless they noticed that the music had caused the mood. The study rated a product, not a price.
- Herbert Bless and colleagues found in 1990 that people in a good mood were swayed by strong and weak arguments alike, while people in a sad mood were persuaded only by strong ones.
- Andreas Drichoutis and colleagues found that positive-mood bidders in auctions bid lower, and Jennifer Lerner and colleagues found in 2004 that sadness raised buying prices above selling prices.
- Cuizhen Liu and colleagues found in 2016 that disgust, sadness, anger and fear raised rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game, while happiness did not. No study found tested price fairness directly.
Negative emotions made people more likely to reject an unfair offer in the ultimatum game. Happiness did not. That is the closest test found of whether a good mood makes a price look fair, and it involved no price.
The nearest fairness test used a game, not a price
In the ultimatum game, one player proposes how to split a sum and the other accepts or rejects, and a rejection leaves both with nothing. Rejecting a lopsided split is a fairness verdict with a cost attached. Liu and colleagues induced seven emotions across three experiments, reported in Scientific Reports: disgust, sadness, anger, fear, happiness, surprise and a neutral state. They then measured how often people rejected unfair offers.
Disgust, sadness, anger and fear all increased rejections. Happiness and surprise did not. The authors suggest that negative emotions in general make people focus on the negative side of a situation, which raises sensitivity to fairness, and the effect did not depend on which negative emotion was felt. On this evidence a good mood makes a price look fair only in the sense that it fails to make it look worse. Whether it lifts the verdict above where a neutral mood leaves it is not what the study shows.
The searches run for this piece found no study that induced a mood and then asked shoppers whether a price was fair, so the claim in the title has no direct test that was found. The rest of the evidence comes from neighbouring questions.
Why a passing feeling can count as evidence about anything
Norbert Schwarz and his colleagues built an account, known as mood as information, in which a feeling works as a piece of evidence. People ask themselves how they feel and read the answer as a verdict on whatever is in front of them. A good mood signals that things are fine and gives little reason to look harder, while a bad mood signals a problem and sharpens the look. That two-sided reading is the bridge between feelings as evidence and the findings on scrutiny later in this piece.
good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster
Daniel Kahneman gives the idea a place in Thinking, Fast and Slow, where he groups a good mood with intuition, creativity and gullibility, and sadness with vigilance and suspicion. The grouping is his summary, and the book's own text rarely names the experiments behind it, so the primary papers carry the weight here.
The tempting inference, that a customer in a good mood will find a price fairer, borrows from an experiment run in 1993 by Gerald Gorn and colleagues. Participants rated stereo speakers while music put them in a good or a bad mood. When they did not connect the music with their mood, those in a good mood rated the speakers more favourably. When the link was made obvious, the difference disappeared, and only the good-mood group seemed able to correct for it. The experiment rated a product, and did not ask about price. The authors added that people in a bad mood may find it hard to judge an outside object objectively even when they try.
Service staff and their customers are the setting for an article on [emotional contagion at the counter](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/emotional-contagion-between-staff-and-customers).
What a good mood leaves unchecked in a message
What a good mood does to the checking itself was the question in a set of 1990 experiments by Herbert Bless and colleagues. In them, participants in a sad mood were persuaded by a message contrary to their views only when its arguments were strong. Participants in a good mood were swayed by strong and weak arguments alike, unless they were told to focus on the content.
A distracting task erased the advantage of strong arguments for the sad group and left the good-mood group unchanged. The authors concluded that people in a good mood elaborate less on a message. In both experiments the good-mood group's verdict did not track the quality of the arguments, and that is the sense in which a good mood lowers the checking.
A price is also a message, and some prices demand more checking than others. A partitioned price shows its parts and leaves the total to the reader. Gopal Das and colleagues reported three laboratory experiments and a study in a natural setting in 2020, measuring attractiveness and intention to buy rather than fairness.
In the first experiment, people in a positive mood rated a product as more attractive, and said they were more likely to buy it, when its price was partitioned than when it was combined. In two later experiments, people with low pricing tactic persuasion knowledge, meaning they were less likely to recognise pricing tactics, preferred partitioned prices, which the authors attribute to ease of processing. The abstract does not say how mood was induced or how many people took part, so the figures behind it were not checked.
Read together with Bless, the route is plausible: a good mood leaves the adding-up undone, and a price nobody has added up is easier to accept. That route is an inference from two studies that did not set out to test it.
Whether a good mood raises or lowers what buyers bid
If a good mood relaxed the buyer, bids should rise. Andreas Drichoutis and colleagues induced different moods and ran auctions in which people bid for goods. Their positive-mood participants showed fewer preference reversals and bid lower than the others, which the authors read as more rational behaviour. From the abstract alone, the negative-mood result cannot be told from the neutral one. The authors reported the work as a working paper in 2010 and in Studies in Microeconomics in 2014, under a different title.
In the one auction study with a positive-mood group, then, the positive mood pushed bids down, which is not what a general softening of the buyer would predict. A bid is also a different output from a fairness verdict, so it bears on the question only from one side.
Emotions from an unrelated situation also carry over into money decisions, as Jennifer Lerner and colleagues found in 2004, and neither of the emotions they induced was happiness. Disgust lowered both selling and buying prices and removed the endowment effect. Sadness reversed it, so that buying prices exceeded selling prices. The decisions involved real money, and the authors present the result as evidence that incidental emotions can shape such choices and that emotions of the same sign can push a price in opposite directions. Mood does move what people will pay, in ways that depend on the emotion and the task.
What a shopper can check before trusting a good feeling
The table sets out what each study measured and what it shows for a good mood.
| Study | Mood or emotion | What was measured | What it shows for a good mood |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gorn and colleagues, 1993 | Good or bad mood from music | Ratings of stereo speakers | Higher ratings, until the source of the mood was noticed |
| Bless and colleagues, 1990 | Good or sad mood | Persuasion by strong and weak arguments | Swayed by both, so less checking |
| Das and colleagues, 2020 | Positive or negative mood | Attractiveness and intention to buy, with partitioned or combined prices | Partitioned prices rated more attractive |
| Drichoutis and colleagues, 2014 | Positive mood and others | Bids and preference reversals in auctions | Lower bids, fewer reversals |
| Lerner and colleagues, 2004 | Disgust and sadness | Buying and selling prices | Not tested |
| Liu and colleagues, 2016 | Seven emotions, including happiness | Rejection of unfair offers | No increase in rejection |
Gorn's result carries a practical detail. The mood effect on ratings vanished once participants noticed what had caused their mood. Kahneman describes a related experiment on intuitions with the same shape, in which participants told that the music in their headphones would influence their emotional reactions lost the effect. He does not name the team in the text, so it supports the pattern and nothing more.
For a shopper, the step the evidence points to is cheap: ask what produced the good feeling before accepting the number. If it came from music, a pleasant meal or a friendly assistant, the feeling has no bearing on whether the price is fair. No study found tested that step on prices. It is carried over from product ratings and one unnamed experiment.
For a seller the evidence is less comfortable. What a good mood is shown doing is lowering scrutiny and, in one partitioned-price test, raising interest. What a bad mood is shown doing is raising sensitivity to unfairness. The 1990 persuasion result and the 2016 fairness result describe one asymmetry from two sides: a good mood relaxes the check and a bad mood tightens it. The studies used different moods, tasks and outcomes, so they are best read as a pattern and not as a sum. A price that holds only because nobody examined it holds until someone does.
The missing test is easy to describe. Induce a mood, show everyone the same price, collect a fairness rating next to a purchase decision, and tell one group the true source of the mood. Until someone runs it, the question in the title has no direct answer.
Common questions
Why does a good mood make a price look fair?
It may not make the price look fairer so much as get it checked less. Good-mood participants in a 1990 persuasion study were swayed by weak arguments as readily as strong ones, and good-mood participants in a 1993 study rated a product more favourably unless they noticed the source of their mood. Neither study asked about price fairness.
Does a good mood make people pay more?
Not in the auction evidence found. Andreas Drichoutis and colleagues found that positive-mood bidders bid lower, and Jennifer Lerner and colleagues found in 2004 that sadness raised buying prices relative to selling prices. Mood moves what people pay, in directions that depend on the emotion and the task.
Can you stop a mood from changing what you accept?
The evidence is indirect. In the 1993 study of stereo speakers by Gerald Gorn and colleagues, the mood effect disappeared when participants noticed what had caused their mood. No study found tested that step on prices, so it is a reasonable habit, not a proven remedy.
Sources
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Chapter 5, 'Cognitive Ease', pp. 67-70. The text names none of the experiments, so it is used for the premise only.
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (2003). 'Mood as information: 20 years later.' Psychological Inquiry, 14(3-4), 296-303. doi:10.1207/S15327965PLI1403&4_20
Gorn, G. J., Goldberg, M. E., & Basu, K. (1993). 'Mood, Awareness, and Product Evaluation.' Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2(3), 237-256. doi:10.1016/S1057-7408(08)80016-2. Read at the level of the abstract.
Bless, H., Bohner, G., Schwarz, N., & Strack, F. (1990). 'Mood and Persuasion: A Cognitive Response Analysis.' Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16(2), 331-345. doi:10.1177/0146167290162013. Read at the level of the abstract.
Das, G., Roy, R., & Naidoo, V. (2020). 'When do consumers prefer partitioned prices? The role of mood and pricing tactic persuasion knowledge.' Journal of Business Research, 116, 60-67. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.05.013. Abstract only: mood induction and sample sizes not read.
Drichoutis, A. C., Nayga, R. M., Jr., & Klonaris, S. (2014). 'Decision-making in Home-grown Value Auctions under Induced Mood States.' Studies in Microeconomics, 2(2), 141-163. doi:10.1177/2321022214545270. Earlier version, same authors: 'The Effects of Induced Mood on Preference Reversals and Bidding Behavior in Experimental Auction Valuation' (2010), MPRA Paper 25597. Both read at the level of the abstract and treated as one study.
Lerner, J. S., Small, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. (2004). 'Heart strings and purse strings: Carryover effects of emotions on economic decisions.' Psychological Science, 15(5), 337-341. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00679.x.
Liu, C., Chai, J. W., & Yu, R. (2016). 'Negative incidental emotions augment fairness sensitivity.' Scientific Reports, 6, 24892. doi:10.1038/srep24892. Read at the level of the abstract.