Affective Paternalism

Many decisions are curated, incentivised, or nudged by a third party. Despite this, only a handful of studies have looked at paternalistic decision-makers and the processes by which they arrive at their decisions. The role of affect, in particular, has been ignored so far, and yet restricting agency on a potentially large group of people might be unpleasant – or indeed quite satisfying. We are the first to propose a conceptual framework of affective paternalism which explicitly accounts for the role of affect, identifying entry points where affect may create systematic variance (or noise) in paternalistic decisions. We shed light on some of these phenomena by using novel surveys and a randomised experiment in which we ask participants to make paternalistic decisions whilst also asking them about their affective reactions and randomly manipulating their affective states. Our findings suggest that affect may play a significant role in paternalistic decision-making.