Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Emotion was the topic of my last week of Dan Ariely’s online class on Behavioral Economics. There were some things I thought I understood intuitively that became more interesting when it turned out there’s science behind it.

As we’ve all experienced, there are two sides to decision-making: rational and emotional, through the cognitive and limbic systems (can you say lizard brain?). The limbic is what we want from one evolutionary perspective (see that saber-tooth tiger and run). It takes input from the outside world and executes quickly, without taking the cognitive factor into consideration. So why even have emotions from an evolutionary standpoint? Although they’re not necessarily good for us at a particular moment, emotions are important for teaching us lessons we can use for planning.

Here are some interesting things to realize about emotion and how it plays into our decision-making:

·       Emotions are temporary, but we don’t think of them that way. They’re more transient and short-lived than we expect; we always think we’ll be happier or sadder for longer than we actually are. Most people adapt back to their previous states rather quickly.

·       Emotions can completely overtake cognition. Our predictions about how we’ll behave in a higher emotional state are largely off the mark. Our emotions take over, and we drastically underestimate the extent to which this will happen.

·       When making predictions about our future actions in an emotional state, we suffer from an intra-empathy gap, i.e., we don’t really understand ourselves very well when it comes to how we’ll behave when under a strong emotion. If we were like Dr. Jekyll and understood that when we're in an emotional state (Mr. Hyde) we behave differently, we would know how to deal with the consequences. But people don't estimate correctly the extent to which they’ll change.

·       The more primal the emotion, the more likely it is to hijack cognition and create a whole new set of behaviors we just don’t see coming.

However, there actually are times we should choose emotionally. This is my favorite: If you’re buying a product that will be “consumed” emotionally, a lack of cognitive input can lead to increased enjoyment (such as with art). The decision environment should match up with the consumption environment. If you want to have fun with something, then don’t get bogged down with a lot of facts—you’ll like it more if you just buy what you like emotionally.

Amazon.com, here I come!