Are You Making Decisions With Your Head or With Your Heart?
Should you listen to your head or your heart when making decisions? I know I struggle more than often with this question. But actually, can we really control this? How much of your decision-making process is logical vs intuitive? Rational vs Emotional?
Let’s consider the case of “Elliot”, a successful businessman who lost part of his brain’s frontal lobe while having surgery to remove a tumour. Following his surgery, Elliot struggled to make even simple choices or decisions.
Choices or decisions are generally considered rational when they are based on objective facts rather than feelings. But facts have to be assessed with a set of rules. For each of us these rules are our beliefs system. Since we all have different belief systems, what could be rational for me could appear irrational for you.
Behavioural researchers also add that a rational choice maximizes the personal benefit of the decision maker. This raises questions like whether drug addicts are rational, for in taking drugs they are, after all, maximizing their pleasure, even if they harm themselves in the process. Therefore, saying that something is rational depends on the point of view.
On the other hand, choices or decisions are considered intuitive when they are based primarily on conscious or unconscious emotions. In that process, past associations that have been stored in our long-term memory are accessed unconsciously and become the basis for our choices or decisions. That’s what Elliot was no longer able to do after his surgery. He still had very high IQ and could hold rational thinking but his decision-making capability was impaired.
The story of Elliot was first shared by Portuguese-American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio who made extensive researches on the importance of emotions in decision-making. He studied people like Elliot with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. Damasio found that although the cognitive abilities (the ability to manipulate data and to make analysis of costs and benefits in a very cold way) of the patients in the study were maintained, they were not able to make simple decisions like choosing a restaurant for the evening. Damasio explained that “the reason why they can’t choose is that they haven’t got this sort of lift that comes from emotion. It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good bad or indifferent literally in the flesh and it is that kind of emotional impetus that they are lacking. They cannot conjure up for a given situation an emotional state that would decide them in one direction or another.”[1]
When we go through life situations, we remember not only the factual results that enrich our rational thinking, but also the emotional feelings that we have from the experience. Whether we felt good or bad as a result of a particular situation creates an emotional association that is stored in our subconscious and recalled when similar situation occurs again. The patients in the study of Antonio Damasio had lost access to their emotional bank and could not choose one option over another one because they had no reference to appreciate how they can expect to feel.
For us this means that we must pay special attention to the content of our emotional bank account and the emotional associations that have been formed and stored over time. Since we are highly driven by the avoidance of pain and the maximization of pleasure, the emotional association that we make to pain and pleasure shape most of our decisions.
In conclusion, we can say that our emotions have a critical influence on the quality of our decisions. We determine alternative options by looking at the facts, then we make the final choice based on our feelings. Therefore we must continuously work on developing our emotional intelligence and apply logical and rational thinking to our emotions in order to control their expression. As Antonio Damasio said, “what we construct as wisdom over time is actually a result of cultivating that knowledge about how our emotions behaved and what we learn from them.” [1]
[1] Antonio Damasio, Interview on Fora TV, https://youtu.be/1wup_K2WN0I
