Yes, but use them to your advantage.
1️⃣ 🕹️ Emotions are potent drivers for decision-making, both harmful and beneficial.
→ Harmful - ex: anger can lead to high risk actions
→ Beneficial - ex: fear can help decide to run from perceived danger
2️⃣ 🎲 Emotions are not just random.
There are regularities & predictable effects emotions can have on decisions.
3️⃣ 💬 Emotions can be integral or incidental.
INTEGRAL → felt at the time of decision and directly related to it
Ex: fear of losing money when deciding between investments
INCIDENTAL → arise from a decision at hand and are (typically) not relevant for deciding
Ex: feeling angry about traffic jam when having to decide about what to eat for dinner
4️⃣ 🧠 Emotions influence decisions in 3 ways:
1. CONTENT OF THOUGHT:
Anger → high certainty, individual control; low pleasantness; low perception of risk.
Fear → low certainty and sense of control; high perception of risk
Pride → high certainty, individual control; low antecipated effort
2. DEPTH OF THOUGHT:
High certainty emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, etc) elicit more heuristic & expertise-based decisions, increase use of stereotypes, rely more on the source, attractiveness, likeability rather than content, less attention to argument quality
Low certainty emotions (sadness, fear) tend to use more systematic processing or excessive rumination
3. CONTENT OF IMPLICIT GOALS:
Ex: I feel anxiety when facing a decision ⇒ anxiety (incidental) drives me to reduce uncertainty ⇒ decision goal is doing what minimizes uncertainty/risk
🥇 HOW CAN WE REDUCE THEIR NEGATIVE EFFECT?
➡️ Reducing the intensity:
TIME DELAY → very simply let time pass before deciding
REAPPRAISAL → reframe, rationalise and put in context
COUNTERACT W/ AN EMOTION-BASED BIAS IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION → induce another emotion which triggers opposite tendencies in decision
➡️ Reducing their use as an input to decide:
CHOICE ARCHITECTURE → design the environment around to mitigate the exposure time-to-act to the emotion
PREPARATION → study how to decide when a certain scenario occurs even though you feel the emotion
PAST EXPERIENCE / GRADUAL EXPOSURE → well-known scenarios can elicit less intense emotions (except in pathology) which dulls their effect when deciding
⚠️ Trying to suppress emotions or crowding them out (saturating our thinking with cognitive facts) have been proven to be too effortful and not optimal.
Bodenhausen et al. 2000; Lerner, 2015; Gilbert 2006; Loewenstein 2000;