Synopsis: [You might view the earlier post “ Effective decisions: the intelligent ability” before this.] Thinking, when assisted by emotions, leads to better choosing. The intuitive mind, with its innate ‘trigger’ of emotion, makes the tough choices come right.
People tend to distrust emotions believing them to be irrational outpourings that create stress and disrupt proceedings.
Better judgement
But, being unemotional and at the other end of the continuum, is just as disruptive.
In fact, among the many crucial cross-cultural associations, mergers and acquisitions that happened over the last decade or so, at least two-thirds turned out failures.
Not because financial or logical analyses were off the mark, but as a matter of ignorance about culture and emotion. Thinking, when assisted by emotions, leads to better judgement. Passion (another word for emotion) introduces the cutting edge to cognition.
Generalizing
How do emotions really act? First, they help to identify things, generalizing understanding between different centres of the brain.
Experiments with the “split brain” (separated left and right brain hemispheres) showed that even subtle shades of emotion generated in the right hemisphere by a stimulus known only to it, can get across to help the isolated left hemisphere ‘guess’ the nature of what it could be.
Reduce overload
Researchers at the University of Waterloo explained that positive and negative emotions actually reduce the pressure of information overload in complex social situations.
Emotions signal what one really cares about. Pleasure or excitement about a particular action proves that its possible outcomes are genuinely important.
Negative emotions also help to narrow down alternatives in option selections. Action processes associated with strong negative emotional feelings will be rejected at the outset, reducing the burden of computation.
The emotional base ensures that the decisions and their goals are inherently significant.
Speed scans
Thence, in our decision-making processes, emotions slash the:
- number of alternatives evaluated
- time taken for considering each.
In uncertain or threatening situations in our evolutionary past, speed scans or quick environmental surveys ensured survival. Our intuitive mind carries the ability forward to the present day.
The intuitive trigger
Our intuition is thus critical to our decisions in adapting to unknown or unfamiliar situations and contexts.
The quick grasp of a problem and its implications by this rapid route of thinking helps us understand and assess issues, decide between options and then act upon the right selection.
The intuitive mind, with its innate ‘trigger’ of emotion, helps make the tough choices come right.
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