Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decisionmaking?: A Hedgefoxian Perspective

8. The Functions of Emotion in Decision Making and Decision Avoidance

• 8 • The Functions of Emotion in Decision Making and Decision Avoidance CHRISTOPHER J. ANDERSON DECISIONS have long been thought to suffer from the irrational influence of emotions. Emotions have been portrayed as an illegitimate factor in legal decisions (Dworkin 1977). Greek and Roman philosophers suggested that people would make better decisions if they minimized the emotional aspect of their inner lives. Most of these views portray “pure cognition” (that is, reason) as the primary, normative factor in decision making. Cognition is seen as constructing goals and decisions, and emotion is seen as playing a secondary role, perturbing the processes of reason. In considering the interplay between decision, action, and emotion, some alternative roles emerge. When considering the question of whether emotions are harmful or helpful to decisions, we tend to make similar assumptions regarding the interplay of emotion and decision. The fundamental assumption is that a decision has primacy in time; the perception of a need for decision is taken as a given, as if it were a property of the environment. That is, when considering the role of the emotions, we often assume implicitly that the need for a decision is perceived first, and then emotions may enter into the decision process at any point after which it has begun. In this view, emotions may perhaps alter the decision from what it might have been had the decision maker avoided emotions during the decision process. In this case, the helpfulness and 183 harmfulness of the emotions would be solely evaluated based on how emotions changed a decision from an emotionless benchmark. This view of the interplay of emotions and decision, emotion-mediated decision making, has some merit, but conceals more than it reveals about emotions and decision making. Emotions have several additional critical roles in the decision process which are unrecognized in the emotionmediated decision making perspective. A more encompassing view of the role of emotions in decisions, emotion-constructed decision making, includes the following roles: 1. Emotions constitute decisions; decisions are not a given but are shaped and created by emotions. 2. Emotions do affect the decision process once it is begun, though it is more effective to consider this as a question of which emotions affect the process, and the weight given them, than to attempt to compare emotional to emotionless decision making. 3. Emotions do not necessarily only lead to bad or good decisions, but can also lead to decision avoidance or decision seeking. Emotions influence metadecisions. 4. Emotions are involved in the implementation of decisions; once a decision has (apparently) been made, emotional factors may lead either to stalling or to swiftness in the implementation of the option chosen. 5. Emotions are part of the consequences of the outcomes of decisions, which in turn shapes their role in all phases of future decisions for that individual. When considering whether emotions are helpful or harmful to decisions , it is necessary to consider all five roles that emotions play in the decision making process. The emotion-constructed decision making perspective is useful for expanding the focus from emotion’s mediating role in decision making. Figure 8.1 summarizes the differences between the two perspectives. This chapter elaborates on each role of emotion in order to broaden the basic framework for how we construe the emotiondecision interface. As understanding the failure to decide is particularly relevant when considering emotions and decisions, we will also consider how each role of emotion contributes to decision avoidance. Emotions Constitute Decisions: An Emotion-Constructed Decision Making Perspective Scant work in any field of study has addressed the question of how decisions are perceived (Chapman and Niedermayer 2001). When do individuals perceive that they are facing a decision? What prompts that 184 Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? event, and how are the perceptions shaped? Traditionally, the field has taken decisions for granted as something that the environment provides opportunities for. This is seen in the tendency for researchers to explicitly provide opportunities for decisions to research participants and to structure the options for them. In doing so, researchers do not ask questions regarding where decisions come from in a participant’s ecology, nor what role emotions may play in choosing among decisions and in structuring those decisions. To illustrate the ambiguities this approach creates, consider the original work documenting the status quo bias, a potentially general bias that humans have towards making decisions which preserve their current state of...