Mood as Information

What it is

The starting point is a 1983 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore. An interviewer telephoned students on sunny days and on rainy ones, posing as calling from out of town, and asked how satisfied they were with their lives. People called on sunny days reported more satisfaction, but only when their attention had not been drawn to the weather. When the interviewer first asked, as an aside, how the weather was, the difference disappeared. The negative effect of a bad mood was removed when people could attribute it to an outside source. The authors developed the account over the following decades, including in a 2003 review, "Mood as information: 20 years later".

Richard Shotton's The Choice Factory (Bias 8, pages 57 to 61) applies this family of ideas to media planning, arguing that people in a good mood notice more advertising, like it more and examine it less. It cites work by Fred Bronner and colleagues (2007) and by Nancy Puccinelli and colleagues (2015), and adds the author's own survey, in which 21 per cent of respondents who rated their mood at seven or more out of ten liked the advert shown, against 13 per cent at six or below.

In effect

A good mood may make an advert or an offer seem more appealing than it is, and noticing where the mood came from can take the edge off. On spending itself, Kyle Murray and colleagues found in 2010 that more sunlight was linked to more spending, through a reduction in bad mood rather than an increase in good mood.

What it does not say

The original study had 84 participants, 14 to a group, and Richard Lucas and Nicole Lawless noted that its central result depended heavily on one group. In 2013 they linked the answers of 1,071,290 Americans to the weather on the day of interview and found most conditions unrelated to life satisfaction, with the few effects very small; they could not rule out effects altogether. A 2017 study by Yap and colleagues also found tiny or no effects, and the original authors have disputed that verdict. A null result about weather does not undo the broader idea that feelings feed judgements. Shotton's survey asked about the advert before the mood, so it cannot show which came first. The status here is mixed.

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