14 DAY TRIAL // Being subjected to stress in your everyday life could interfere with the way in which you would normally make decisions. Investigators determined that people in this situation are more likely to think things will go right if they decide to act a certain way, or make a certain decision.
In other words, they tend to pay more attention, and give more weight, to possibly positive outcomes than negative ones. This happens even if the objective odds are stacked against making that decision.
Details of the investigation appear in a paper published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The work was carried out by experts at the University of Southern California (USC), who were led by Mara Mather, PhD.
She is one of the co-authors of the research paper. The other co-author is USC PhD student Nichole Lighthall, PsychCentral reports. The team says that stress may refer to both physical and mental discomfort, depending on the situation.
In experiments conducted in the lab, people who were asked to keep their hands in cold water for 10 minutes were equally stressed as those who were simply asked to make a short speech.
Seeing only the silver lining after analyzing a scenario is “not what people would think right off the bat. Stress is usually associated with negative experiences, so you’d think, maybe I’m going to be more focused on the negative outcomes,” Mather explains.
Increased stress also makes people more likely to accept positive information, and more likely to reject negative data, regarding the decision or behavior they are analyzing. “Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback,” the expert adds.
Applied to our daily lives, she says, this may translate into a prospective employee placing more weight on an increased salary than on a worse commute. In fact, the latter may seem unworthy to even consider.
These findings also provide a new perspective on analyzing leaders. Top politicians and military commanders are faced with having to make tough decisions in stressful situations all the time, so this flaw in our response to stress may interfere with making the right call.
“We make all sorts of decisions under stress. It seems likely that how much stress you’re experiencing will affect the way you’re making the decision,” Mather concludes.