Economia comportamental: o impacto da verbalização de emoções sobre a polarização de opinião dos agentes

Abstract

Behavioral economics is based on the combination of principles derived from economics, psychology and sociology. This area seeks to explain events which economic agents present limitations to the exercise of full rationality, that is, the opposite of what is advocated by conventional economic theory. This area is a complement for existing economics’ models. The general objective of this work is to follow the behavioral and experimental premises, associating hypotheses from psychology to known theories in the field of economics. The specific objective is to estimate the impact of affect labeling on ​​the polarization of individuals' opinions and on the way agents constitute their preferences, considering that they have consolidated prior beliefs. Following this purpose, three experiments are conducted online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Based on the results found, it can be assumed that affect labeling, by inducing emotion regulation, is a potential tool to be used as a public policy to mitigate the polarization of society's beliefs and to decrease the polarizing effects caused by the dissemination of information. Enabling agents to go through a process of emotional regulation when having access to information could be an effective instrument for them to form their preferences in a more rational way, enabling the possible optimal choice and maximization of the expected utility.