Emotions Mediate Decisions Always and Everywhere

Decision governance can influence the situation in which the decision is made, and put requirements on decision makers in terms of what information they use and how they obtain this information, it can influence the incentives they have to accept and exercise decision rights, and so on. At the same time, having a good understanding of the role of emotions in decision making may lead to governance which can exploit emotions, a practice that I discourage: decision governance can only be credible if it influences decision making in a transparent and constructive manner.

This text is part of the series on the design of decision governance. Decision Governance refers to values, principles, practices designed to improve the quality of decisions. Find all texts on decision governance here, including “What is Decision Governance?” here.

Decision governance can be designed to make decision makers aware of their and others’ emotions in a decision situation, and to help everyone move to a more neutral stance, if that can lead to a better outcome. Common strategies for doing so are listed below.

Situation Selection: If the decision maker may have incentives to avoid the decision situation, governance can create friction to this happening. For example, we can choose a situation which may include cues that trigger specific emotions of the decision maker.
1. We can introduce a step in the decision process to reduce the likelihood of them leaving. That additional step might involve asking the decision maker to provide reasons for wanting to leave, or doing analysis to assess reasons to remain and to leave, and working then on what can be changed to reduce the likelihood that they want to avoid the same decision situation in the future.
2. Incentives can be such that they discourage the decision maker to leave.
3. We can provide training to the decision maker to detect their own tendency to avoid specific decision situations, look for reasons for this, and then reappraise the situation (see below).
Situation Modification: This involves taking actions to change the decision situation in order to influence its emotional impact.
1. Incentives can be designed to motivate the decision maker to regulate emotions by changing the situation.
2. We can require that options and criteria, for example, are presented in a neutral manner, without intent to stimulate debate, create controversy, or show disappointment.
3. We can mandate having advisors to the decision maker, who can identify and recommend changes to the situation.
4. We can provide training to the decision maker on how to detect emotions that they may have and can impact their decision making, and have incentives for them to be trained.
Attentional Deployment: This involves redirecting attention in the decision situation – see the text on the role of attention in decision making, here.
Cognitive Change (Cognitive Reappraisal): This involves changing how the decision maker thinks about a situation to change its emotional impact. Decision governance can be used to emphasize factual information for example, to highlight potential impacts of emotions on decision making, as well as require the decision maker to do introspection together with an advisor, before making the choice.
Preparation: Decision governance can require working with the decision maker prior to decision making, to identify cues that may stimulate specific emotional responses. This can be used to design ways to detect such cues before the decision maker, and either steering the decision maker’s attention away from them, reframing them with the decision maker, or changing the situation to remove these cues and avoid the emotional response. Preparation can lead to various other strategies above.

The rest of this text, below, is useful if you need background information on emotion regulation in decision making and the relationship between emotions and decision making.

How Can Emotions Influence Decision Making?

Emotions play an important role in decision-making, often influencing choices in ways that differ from purely rational evaluations of considered options. Emotions can act as quick, automatic responses that guide behavior, especially under conditions of uncertainty or time pressure. For instance, fear might lead someone to avoid risky options, while excitement might encourage taking greater risks. These emotional responses can sometimes override cognitive evaluations, leading to decisions that might not align with logical, or what is often called rational reasoning.

Moreover, emotions can color how information is perceived and remembered, further shaping decisions. A positive mood might lead to an optimistic assessment of outcomes, while anxiety can heighten perceptions of potential negative consequences. Emotions also impact the anticipation of future feelings, with people often choosing options they believe will maximize positive emotions or minimize regret and disappointment.

Understanding the interplay between emotion and cognition is thus crucial for a comprehensive understanding of decision-making behavior.

How emotions that we predict to have about outcomes influence decisions?

Anticipated emotions refer to those we expect to experience as a result of the outcomes of their decisions. For instance, someone might anticipate feeling regret if a risky decision leads to a negative outcome or relief if it leads to a positive one. These anticipated emotions can strongly influence decision-making, as people would be expected to choose actions that they believe will maximize positive emotions and minimize negative ones.

Anticipated emotions influence evaluations of probabilities of positive and negative outcomes. People weigh anticipated positive and negative emotions, and that weight can influence the probability they expect the corresponding outcomes to have. Such probabilities may not reflect at all the probability one would assign an outcome if they had neutral emotions with respect to that outcome. This can lead to decisions that prioritize emotional satisfaction over purely rational considerations.

How emotions experienced at decision time influence choice?

While anticipated emotions are future-oriented and involve forecasting how one will feel about a decision’s outcomes, immediate emotions are the feelings experienced at the moment of making the decision. Both types of emotions influence decision-making, but anticipated emotions involve simulating or imagining future emotional states.

Immediate emotions can alter how risk is perceived and assessed. For example, fear might lead to an overestimation of potential dangers, causing individuals to avoid risks that they might otherwise take if they were relying solely on cognitive assessments. Conversely, excitement might lead to underestimating risks and pursuing riskier options.

Because immediate emotions can be intense and immediate, they often drive people to make decisions that prioritize short-term emotional states over long-term benefits. This can result in decisions that are more impulsive or less considered than those based purely on cognitive evaluations.

How do specific emotions influence the behavior of the decision maker?

In research on the relationship between emotions and decision-making, the term “valence” refers to the intrinsic positivity or negativity of an emotion. It categorizes emotions based on whether they are generally experienced as pleasant or unpleasant.

Positive Valence: Emotions such as happiness, joy, and contentment, which are associated with pleasurable experiences.
Negative Valence: Emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and disgust, which are associated with unpleasant experiences.

Valence is used to predict how emotions might influence decision-making. The basic idea is that positive emotions (positive valence) tend to lead to optimistic judgments and risk-taking, while negative emotions (negative valence) lead to pessimistic judgments and risk aversion.

However, as highlighted in studies like Lerner and Keltner’s “Beyond Valence,” [6] this approach can be overly simplistic. Different emotions with the same valence can have divergent effects on decision-making. For example, both fear and anger have negative valence, but fear generally increases risk aversion, while anger can lead to risk-taking. This has led researchers to explore emotion-specific influences beyond just valence.

In “Beyond Valence” [6], authors focus on several emotions – fear, anger, sadness, and disgust – and discuss how each uniquely impacts judgment and choice. Here’s a breakdown of how these emotions influence decision-making:

Fear is characterized by appraisals of uncertainty and situational control, where the individual feels that external circumstances are controlling the outcome. This leads to increased risk aversion and pessimism in decision-making. People who are fearful tend to perceive higher risks and are more likely to make conservative choices to avoid potential negative outcomes.
Anger, like fear, is a negative emotion, but it is associated with appraisals of certainty and individual control. This means that when people are angry, they feel more confident in their understanding of a situation and believe they can influence the outcome. As a result, anger often leads to decreased risk perception, making people more optimistic and risk-seeking in their decisions.
Sadness is linked to appraisals of loss and helplessness. When people feel sad, they often perceive situations as being out of their control and focus on what has been lost. This leads to a desire for change and a tendency to seek out new opportunities or substitutes, often resulting in risk-averse behavior. However, sadness can also increase willingness to pay for new options, as individuals may be motivated to replace what they’ve lost.
Disgust is associated with appraisals of contamination and a strong urge to distance oneself from the source of disgust. In decision-making, this emotion typically leads to more conservative choices and a strong aversion to taking risks, particularly those that could involve exposure to the perceived source of contamination. Disgust can also lead to harsher moral judgments and avoidance behaviors.
While not the focus of the paper, happiness is often mentioned for contrast. Happiness is associated with appraisals of safety and a sense of achievement. It generally leads to more optimistic risk assessments and risk-seeking behavior, as individuals in a happy state are more likely to perceive situations as favorable and under their control.

How can the decision maker influence emotions when deciding?

In “The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation” [5], emotion regulation is defined as the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions. This definition encompasses a broad range of strategies that people use to manage their emotions, both consciously and unconsciously, at various stages of the emotion-generative process. Gross emphasizes that emotion regulation can involve altering the intensity, duration, or type of emotion experienced, and can occur before, during, or after an emotional response has been fully generated.

Emotion regulation strategies are categorized into two types: antecedent-focused strategies and response-focused strategies. What follows is a list of the strategies presented in the paper, along with definitions for each.

Antecedent-Focused Strategies

These strategies are employed before the emotional response has been fully activated, intervening early in the emotion generation process.

Situation Selection: This strategy involves choosing to enter or avoid situations based on the emotions they are likely to elicit. For example, someone might avoid a stressful event or seek out a pleasant activity to regulate their emotional state.
Situation Modification: This strategy involves altering the situation directly to change its emotional impact. For example, if someone finds themselves in a stressful situation, they might try to change aspects of the environment or the dynamics of a social interaction to reduce emotional distress.
Attentional Deployment: This strategy refers to directing one’s attention within a given situation to influence emotions. This can include techniques like distraction (focusing on something else to divert attention from the emotional stimulus) or concentration (focusing intently on a non-emotional aspect of the situation).
Cognitive Change (Cognitive Reappraisal): Cognitive change involves altering how one interprets or thinks about a situation to change its emotional impact. For example, someone might reframe a negative event as an opportunity for growth, thereby reducing the emotional intensity of the experience.

Response-Focused Strategies

These strategies are used after the emotional response has been generated, typically focusing on managing the emotional experience or expression.

Response Modulation: This strategy involves influencing the physiological, experiential, or behavioral aspects of the emotional response after it has been fully generated. A common example is expressive suppression.
Expressive Suppression: A specific form of response modulation where individuals deliberately suppress or inhibit their emotional expressions. This might involve trying not to show outward signs of emotion, such as keeping a neutral face when feeling angry or upset.

However, expressive suppression can have several negative implications. Unlike cognitive reappraisal, which can mitigate the emotional experience itself, expressive suppression does not reduce emotional experience but merely conceals its expression. As a result, it can lead to increased physiological arousal and can often feel taxing because the emotional response is still internally experienced even though it is not expressed. This can lead to worse outcomes in terms of psychological well-being, relationship quality, and overall emotional health, as consistently using suppression can strain personal interactions and prevent emotional intimacy.

References and Further Reading

Weber, Elke U., and Eric J. Johnson. “Mindful judgment and decision making.” Annual review of psychology 60.1 (2009): 53-85.
Loewenstein, George F., et al. “Risk as feelings.” Psychological bulletin 127.2 (2001): 267.
Finucane, Melissa L., et al. “The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits.” Journal of behavioral decision making 13.1 (2000): 1-17.
Lerner, Jennifer S., et al. “Emotion and decision making.” Annual review of psychology 66.1 (2015): 799-823.
Gross, James J. “The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review.” Review of general psychology 2.3 (1998): 271-299.
Lerner, Jennifer S., and Dacher Keltner. “Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice.” Cognition & emotion 14.4 (2000): 473-493.