Deciding with Emotions: What the Research Says
We like to think we decide with reason, setting emotions aside in order to see clearly. Yet everyone has known a choice made "reluctantly", or a decision that looked right on paper but that we could not bring ourselves to make. Research from recent decades sheds light on what is happening in those moments.
Emotions are part of the decision
Jennifer Lerner and her colleagues reviewed about thirty-five years of research on the subject. Their conclusion: emotions strongly influence decisions, across a wide range of domains, and their effects can be helpful as well as harmful. They are therefore at work even when we believe we are reasoning coolly.
When facing risk, the emotional reaction can diverge from the reasoned assessment, and often prevails. George Loewenstein and his colleagues bring together several observations pointing in this direction. In one study they cite, people were willing to pay more for flight insurance covering death from "terrorist acts" than for insurance covering death from "all possible causes", which nevertheless includes the former. The authors explain this by the fact that a terrorist act is easy to picture and brings frightening images to mind, whereas "all possible causes" brings none.
Another study they cite illustrates this well. Participants were asked how much they would be willing to pay to avoid an unpleasant event, with a greater or smaller risk of it happening.
When the event was losing twenty dollars, the answer logically followed the risk: 1 dollar if the loss had only a 1% chance of happening, 18 dollars if it was almost certain (99%).
But when it was a brief, painful electric shock, participants were willing to pay 7 dollars for a 1% risk, and only 10 dollars for a 99% risk. In other words, almost the same amount, whether the shock was very unlikely or almost certain.
When an event is emotionally charged, then, it is not probability that guides the decision: the mere possibility that it might happen is enough to trigger fear.
What remains debated
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio did much to bring this link to wider attention, notably through patients whose brain damage had altered their ability to make decisions. In an experiment published in 1997 with his colleagues, participants played a card game with four decks. Two of them paid more on each card but proved disadvantageous in the long run; the other two paid less but were advantageous. Participants without brain damage began choosing the good decks before they could explain why, and their skin reacted slightly before they drew from a risky deck: a slight sweating, which small electrodes placed on the skin can measure. Patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex did not show this reaction and kept choosing poorly, even after they had understood which strategy was the right one. Damasio saw in this the effect of "somatic markers", that is, bodily signals that would guide the decision ahead of conscious awareness.
This interpretation is debated. In 2004, Tiago Maia and James McClelland repeated the experiment with forty students and a more sensitive questionnaire. With the original questions, they found the 1997 results again. With their questionnaire, however, participants knew far more than had been thought: when they chose well, most could estimate the gains and losses of each deck. The two researchers do not rule out that part of the process is nonconscious, but they consider that the hypothesis needs new evidence. A critical review published in 2006 by Barnaby Dunn and colleagues reaches the same conclusion.
The debate therefore concerns the exact mechanism, and leaves intact the link between emotion and decision itself, which many other studies support.
What this can change in everyday life
Without drawing any rule from it, this research invites nuance. A decision made coolly is not for all that free of emotion. And since the effects of emotions can be helpful as well as harmful, it can be useful to acknowledge them rather than set them aside, in order to take them into account consciously in the choice at hand.
Emotions are part of our decisions, and acknowledging them allows us to take them into account with greater freedom.
Sources
- Lerner, J. S., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P., & Kassam, K. S. (2015). Emotion and decision making. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 799-823.
- Loewenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C. K., & Welch, N. (2001). Risk as feelings. Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 267-286.
- Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (1997). Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science, 275(5304), 1293-1295.
- Maia, T. V., & McClelland, J. L. (2004). A reexamination of the evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis: What participants really know in the Iowa gambling task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(45), 16075-16080.
- Dunn, B. D., Dalgleish, T., & Lawrence, A. D. (2006). The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 30(2), 239-271.