The role of emotions in decision-making

Here’s a brief extract from my book ‘The Brain-Based Boss’:

Thomas Gilovich, a leading psychologist looking into decision-making and behavioural economics, said, ‘One of the most important findings from my field of psychology is that the tiniest little change in circumstance can have big impacts on people’s behaviour’.

Maybe you’re one of those managers who say things like, ‘They’re paid to show up and do a job, they should show up and do that job’? OK, fair enough. Go with that. Technically, you’re right. People should. All this psych, touchy-feely mumbo-jumbo is a waste of time.

It’d be a much simpler and duller world if that was true but it isn’t. In 1982, neurologist Antonio Damagio showed with his patient ‘Elliot’ that our brains cannot make rational decisions without emotional processing. ‘Elliot’ had an accident that damaged the part of his brain that processed emotions. As a result, he suffered from pathological indecision. That has nothing to do with ‘shoulds’ or ‘shouldn’ts’ but is simply a fact of our physical and mental systems.

You’ll read research later in this book about how to help people harness their subconscious and emotions to make better decisions and generate greater success at work. I always suspected that was true but I never suspected that without that emotional processing going on subconsciously, we wouldn’t just make inferior decisions, we’d be unable to make any decisions at all.