Work & Economy
In touch with our emotions, finally

Insights at intersection of gender, anger, and risk are just one example of shift in science of decision making

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

August 13, 2025 5 min read

Jennifer Lerner is the Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy, Decision Science, and Management at Harvard Kennedy School.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

A series exploring how risk shapes our decisions.

Letting raw emotion drive financial decisions sounds like a recipe for disaster. But Jennifer Lerner, the Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy, Decision Science, and Management at the Kennedy School, found that anger turned out well, at least for men, in a computerized gambling game.

Lerner and National Institutes of Health scientist Rebecca Ferrer (a former student) co-led a set of experiments using the Balloon Analog Risk Task, in which participants earn more money each time they add air to a virtual balloon, but lose it all if they go too far and burst the balloon.

When males were primed for anger, they took bigger risks and walked away with fatter wallets than did neutral-emotion males or angry females. Unlike previous studies that demonstrated causal effects of anger on lowering risk perceptions and reducing the likelihood of taking protective actions among males and females, these experiments focused on actual risk-taking behavior — revealing that anger drove bolder bets, primarily among men.

Correlating gender and emotion is always slippery, Lerner noted. After all, you can’t randomly assign adults to the category of male and female, never mind tease out whether differences are due to biology, socialization, culture, or something else entirely. But the findings raise interesting questions about how gender, emotions, and risk intersect in high-stakes environments like entrepreneurship or the stock market, she said.

“There’s a large and interesting debate about whether males are more risk-taking in general.”

“There’s a large and interesting debate about whether males are more risk-taking in general, which our work only partially addresses,” Lerner said. “It looks only at the role of anger in financial risk-taking and the gender differences there.”

Wanting the results to be understood in broader context, she stressed two points.

“Whether risk-taking turns out to be good or bad depends entirely on the situation,” Lerner said. “We designed our studies to reward risk-taking, but there are many real-world situations where caution would be a better strategy.

“Also, while males and females may differ on average in how anger influences their financial risk-taking, across most decisions there’s more variation within each gender than between genders. So, knowing someone’s gender will tell you less about their decision-making than will understanding their individual traits or social/cultural context.”

Emotion has been massively understudied as a factor in decision-making, according to Lerner. “Even though,” she said, “if you ask people on the street, ‘What’s important to understand in decision-making,’ they often say ‘emotion.’”

Her work plays a role in a recent shift — studies examining how emotion affects decision-making have dramatically increased, recognizing that emotion can be adaptive or maladaptive. More generally, emotion now appears prominently in emerging models of brain, mind, and behavior.

Science is catching up to the widespread use of emotion to shape behavior in marketing campaigns.

In other words, science is catching up to the widespread use of emotion to shape behavior in marketing campaigns. In student-led studies, Lerner’s lab has examined emotionally evocative public health campaigns designed to communicate the risks associated with tobacco use. One study, led by Charlie Dorison, Ph.D. ’20, found that inducing certain kinds of sadness can backfire, inadvertently increasing smoking. Another, led by Ke Wang, Ph.D. ’24, found that gratitude can play a powerful role in encouraging smoking cessation. Both studies come from a broader stream of work in Lerner’s lab examining ways in which emotion influences appetitive risk behaviors (e.g., smoking, vaping, gambling).

In Lerner’s own life, being well-informed about risk gave her something very valuable: her daughter. As a child, Lerner was diagnosed with lupus. Among other effects of the autoimmune disease, she was told she should never have biological children: The risk of miscarriage was high, and her health could be in serious jeopardy. She considered adoption, but soon learned that having lupus would significantly lower the odds that she would ever be selected as an adoptive parent.

Lerner could have let generalized fear guide her decision about having a child. Instead, she and her husband dug into the medical research.

Their plan was to examine feelings shaped by doctors’ warnings and common beliefs before taking a hard look at the actual risks. Was their fear incidental or integral? How much uncertainty could they comfortably tolerate?

“We just analyzed everything, all the scientific studies we could find,” Lerner said. “And we decided, given where my health was at the time and the medications I was on, we could accept the risks.” Two months ago, that baby — now grown up — graduated from college.

Professionally, Lerner studies risk across a variety of domains, including health, economics, national security, and (most recently) climate change. She serves on several councils and boards, including the board of the Forecasting Research Institute, a nonprofit attempting to develop methodologies for quantifying the risk of existential threats (e.g., AI takeover). She believes decision-making skills are essential life skills for everyone, and should be taught at a young age. For that reason, she also volunteers as an ambassador for the Alliance for Decision Education, a nonprofit providing free access to decision-making curricula for K-12 schools. Much of her own time is spent with professionals from around the world who work in decision-intensive roles — “from financial analysts to firefighters,” as she puts it — in an executive education course she teaches.

“In today’s world, the ability to leverage information effectively is a crucial skill,” she said. “That means being clear on how to estimate uncertainty, how to judge your confidence in those estimates, and how to recognize the myriad — helpful or unhelpful — ways emotion may shape judgments. These aren’t just tools for leaders or analysts — they’re for all of us.”

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