The Effect of Joy and Anxiety on Egocentric Decisions among Young Adults
The Effect of Joy and Anxiety on Egocentric Decisions among Young Adults

Summary/Abstract: Adult egocentrism is described as a tendency to assess a situation or object based on personal experience, opinion or attitude, regardless of a different another person’s perspective. Scientists argue that this phenomenon is one of the major sources of interpersonal conflicts and disagreements. Knowing that the daily functioning of young adults is based on social interactions accompanied by various emotions, it is important to understand how this may influence their egocentrism. The aim of the study is to investigate how egocentric decisions of young adults are influenced by the emotions of joy and anxiety. Methods. The experiment was carried out at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. The sample consisted of 35 students from the department of Social Sciences (27 females, 8 males; average age 21.4). In order to cause emotions of joy and anxiety, an autobiographic memory task was used (Todd, Forstmann, Burgmer, Brooks, & Galinsky, 2015). In order to measure egocentric decisions, a perspective-taking task was created which consisted of 10 descriptions of the stories and the same number of voice messages belonging to each story. Results. All the subjects inside the different groups displayed a higher number of egocentric decisions when compared to non-egocentric ones. The results also showed that emotions of joy and anxiety did not increase the occurrence of the egocentric decisions. Conclusions. Our findings underline that emotions of joy and anxiety may not influence egocentric decisions of young adults (aged 18 to 29). The results also suggest that young adults may be essentially egocentric, regardless of such internal factors as emotions.

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