If you have been thinking for a while about going to your boss’s office to ask him a salary increasewe have good news: that time is today. At least if your boss is a soccer fan and a supporter of the Spanish National Team. We don’t say it, it says it a study prepared by US economists who have found a clear relationship between the happiness caused by the successes of a person’s team and their predisposition to be more generous or risky when it comes to spending.
After all, sport may be passionate (Of course football is.), but passions often creep into business as well.
Why do you decide what you decide? It sounds strange, I know; But that is the question that a group of US economists asked themselves a few years ago, including Judd Kesslerfrom the University of Pennsylvania, or Andrew McClellanfrom the University of Chicago. To be more precise, the team attempted to clarify the relationship between a person’s mood and their financial decisions.
“While angry people are advised to ‘think it over’ before making angry decisions, they are rarely advised to consider how incidental happiness influences their behaviors or giving,” slide.
What does it have to do with sport? A lot. If something knows Spain today is that a sporting success can bring hundreds of thousands of people to ecstasy and raise the general mood of a country. Having your team achieve a victory triggers your dopamine levels and that is something that Kessler and his colleagues knew well, so in 2013 they went to a bar on the Upper Esat Side, New York, with a group of American football fans and, once there, they started watching games.
And that for what? To do science… although in an unconventional way. What the economists did was put their ‘Indoas pigs? two live NFL games. In the first, held in December 2013, the Dallas Cowboys they faced Philadelphia Eagles. In the second, in January 2014, the New Orleans Saints and Philadelphia Eagles.
During the commercial breaks, the economists gave them questionnaires to assess how the game affected them on an emotional level (basically whether they felt more or less happy) and then a series of questions related to their greater or lesser willingness to make donations, purchase items or place bets. It was not a simple theoretical exercise. At stake were real dollars with which researchers compensated experimental subjects for their time.
What did they discover? More or less what common sense dictates: when the person interviewed was ecstatic because things were going well for their team, they showed considerably fewer qualms about donating or spending money. It may seem obvious, but researchers claimit is one thing to have an intuition based on experience and another to have a study with academic parameters that demonstrates it. And taking into account that we are talking about something as serious as the factors that influence economic decisions, that is not a minor nuance.
“We have observed that what happens in the game influences the subjects’ incidental happiness, and that changes give rise to predictable variations in their decisions,” they explain researchers, who claim to have developed a system that incorporates mood into economic models. As a reference, the matches altered the emotional state of 81% of the subjects.
Did they go further? Yes. The study results were published first in June 2020 and a few months ago at Cambridge University Press. In their paper, Kessler and his colleagues confirm that “changes in incidental happiness significantly affect” most economic decision-making (two of the four included in the questionnaire) and that the happiest people are those who donate the most to NGOs, spend on consumer goods and take greater risks.
“We observed variations in the economic decisions that the participants made throughout the game. 30 of the 64 participants (47%) change the amount they decide to donate; 36 of the 64 participants (56%) change the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a consumer good, and exactly the same number, 36 of the 64 participants (56%), change the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a lottery,” points out the article of 2020.
Is the relationship so clear? The economists are clear. “We observed that when subjects’ mood improves, when they report feeling happier, they donate more to charities and may be more willing to pay more for a good, be less risk-averse and more confident,” Kessler points out and colleagues: “A person who is in a good mood can be modeled as equivalent to a person who feels richer.”
Images | Wikipedia, Vitaly Gariev (Unsplash) and EmbedSocial (Unsplash)
In Xataka | We believed that there is only one Erling Haaland. Until Peru got imaginative when baptizing its babies
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings