When Being Happy Makes Choosing Harder

Being in a positive mood confers a wide range of benefits on consumers. Positive affect enhances creativity (Isen et al. 1985), promotes self-control (Aspinwall 1998; Ragunathan and Trope 2002), and generally leads to successful outcomes (Lyubomirsky et al. 2005). Based on these findings, one might expect positive mood to have beneficial impact on choice processes. In contrast, we propose that positive mood will at times make choice more difficult, increasing the incidence of choice deferral. We base our propositions on prior work showing that positive mood increases context dependence, or adoption of situation-specific processing cues (Murray et al. 1990; Hunsinger, et al. 2011; Showers and Canter 1985). Although positive mood has been primarily shown to enhance focus on inter-item similarities (Isen and Daubman 1984; Isen et al. 1985; Lee and Sternthal 1999), in situations that cue consumers to focus on differences, positive mood instead increases perceived inter-item differences (Murray et al. 1999; Showers and Canter 1985). For example, Murray et al. (1990) demonstrated that participants in a positive mood identified more similarities between items when prompted to focus on similarities, but also identified more differences when prompted to focus on differences.