Happy Believers and Sad Skeptics? Affective Influences on Gullibility

How does affect influence gullibility? After a brief consideration of the nature of gullibility, I describe a series of experiments that explored the prediction that in situations in which close attention to stimulus information is required, negative mood can reduce gullibility and positive mood can increase gullibility. The experiments examined mood effects on truth judgments, vulnerability to misleading information, the tendency to uncritically accept interpersonal messages, the detection of deception, and the tendency to see meaning in random or meaningless information. In all of these domains, positive mood promoted gullibility and negative mood reduced it. The practical and theoretical significance of these convergent findings are discussed, and the practical implications of affectively induced gullibility in real-life domains are considered.