Emotions and Decision Analysis!
Decision Analysis is a discipline that injects thorough rational thinking in the decision making process. As such, it guides decision makers through normative cognitive models that sharpen the judgment when faced with alternatives to choose from. In doing so, emotions typically take a back seat, while rational thinking is in the driver seat. Furthermore, emotional states can affect our judgment, bias our estimates, and lead to decisions that are incompatible with our declared objectives. Thus, DA professionals are typically wary of emotions.
Yet, without emotions, there is no judgment, and without judgment, we can’t make decisions. For example, values and tradeoffs are based on what we prefer; what moves our heart. Thus, without emotions, we can’t arrive at what we want.
This begs the question, how adequately or appropriately are we engaging emotions in decision analysis today? What opportunities do we have to engage emotions in DA in the future? What openings come up for us for normative approaches to incorporate emotions?
This fascinating topic was the nucleus for a session at the Decision Analysis Affinity Group 2018 conference in Vancouver that I co-chaired with Elayne Ko. In this session, Somik Raha presented on this topic a fascinating summary of neuroscience of emotions, and the impact impaired emotions has on decision making. He then showed how these advances in neuroscience are resonant with his inquiry around listening deeply for feelings in conversations for value discovery. Here is a video of his actual talk. The slides are provided at the end of this post.
In his talk, Somik did a live conversation at the DAAG session that we cannot reproduce due to privacy reasons. However, he gave a very similar guest lecture at Stanford University where a live mapping was captured on video, and you can watch it here from 1:05:03.
The session was designed with an assumption that DA professionals have a negative orientation towards emotions. DA professionals know how important, yet dangerous, emotions are to decision making. The process of DA attempts first and foremost to rein in negative influences of emotions on the decision making process. DA professionals also seem to acknowledge that bringing in emotions is an important part of the process, as was evident in their answers to a survey question administered at the beginning of the session prior to the presentation, shown below. This is a surprising fact coming from professionals who tout their ability to “debias” humans, and reduce the negative influence of emotions; bringing them to their “rational mind”.
Another surprise was that in the span of 90 minutes, including an experiential value mapping exercise, there was a significant positive shift in the attitude of the audience towards emotions.
Furthermore, DA professionals were overwhelmingly likely to consider incorporating emotions when implementing DA.
It can be safely concluded that the recognition of the interplay between emotions and decision making is high and increasing among DA professionals.
I can see a couple of opportunities relating to this topic. First, perhaps understanding the role of emotions in decision making could bridge the normative discipline of DA (how people should make decisions) and the descriptive discipline of behavioral economics (how people actually make decisions).
A broader concept is bridging neuroscience with decision analysis. What if the DA professional can tell (with confidence) when the decision maker truly reached something that is of intrinsic value to them? Can that be used to refine the values and tradeoffs used in the DA process?
It remains to be seen how the practice of DA will evolve around these concepts.
