Do emotions help in decision making?

Picture this. You are shopping for a pair of formal shoes to wear at an important client meeting next week. You have to choose from a variety of shoes in the price range of Rs 2,750-3,000. Will you apply rational thought to buy the shoes? Or will you allow your emotion to guide your decision making?

It is good to be logical. You can use your pocket calculator to check if you should buy the shoes that cost Rs 3,000 or Rs 2,750. Or you can run the calculation in your head. But you are unlikely to do both. For one, you are unlikely to carry a pocket calculator. For another, your brain may not run the arithmetic and come to a logical conclusion! Why?

A part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex is responsible for your logical thinking. But you can easily tire your prefrontal cortex doing complex tasks. And complex tasks need not be about how to effectively land an unmanned satellite on Mars. It can be a simple decision such as whether to buy a 756 ml bottle of olive oil for Rs 450 or 924 ml can for Rs 584.

Logic vs. emotion

Your brain is a battlefield. Your logical side is always fighting your emotional side. And your logical brain becomes overloaded when you do complex tasks. And when it is overloaded, the emotional brain takes over! This means you are more likely to buy based on impulse or emotions than on logic.

The question is: Do emotions help or spoil your decision making process? Neuroscientists have conducted experiments in this area and found that emotions actually aid in your decision making! In one such experiment, two groups were asked to select cards from two decks. Each card carried either a reward or a penalty. After playing the game for a while, one group of participants was able to detect patterns in the two decks- whether a deck carried more reward cards than penalty cards. And what differentiated this group from the other? The other group consisted of brain-damaged patients. That is, these patients were devoid of emotions because part of their brain such as orbito frontal cortex was damaged. These individuals could not, hence, detect patterns and learn from their mistakes! This led the neuroscientists to conclude that emotions are necessary for decision making.

Now, back to your shoe-shopping experience. If all shoes are similar in price and quality, logical thinking is unlikely to help you select a pair. You will most likely choose the one you like (emotions), not necessarily the one that is value for money (rational)!

(The author is the founder of Navera Consulting. He can be reached at >enhancek@gmail.com )

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