From affect to action: How pleasure shapes everyday decisions in Japan and the U.S.

Abstract

How do affective considerations shape people’s everyday decisions around the world? To address this question, we asked 245 Japanese and 229 American adults to report what they did and how they felt on the previous day using the Day Reconstruction Method. We then examined how affective valence at a given time (time t) related to the types of activities people engaged in at a later time (time t + 1). While we found some cultural variation in the types of daily activities Japanese and American participants experienced as pleasant or unpleasant, time-lagged multilevel logistic regressions revealed that both groups displayed a remarkably similar propensity to engage in pleasure-enhancing activities when they felt bad and in less-pleasant activities that might promise longer-term payoff when they felt good. These results provide cross-cultural support for the hedonic flexibility principle of human motivation, according to which affective states help people prioritize between short- and longer-term well-being goals in their everyday life.