Disappointing the future

In childhood, the future holds great promise. Images of things perceived novel around us crowd our brains. At one time or other, and with the discovery of new, exciting roles in life, we emulate train-drivers, firemen, stuntmen, superheroes, writers, musicians, dancers, and so on, as our models for life. The want to be is fleeting, to vanish when some other novelty grabs attention. But adults often are impatient with these daydreams taking away from actual goals. With intent to protect them from themselves, they assume control of and direct their children’s lives, in their own image.

It seems to me that the modern habit of sticking children in walkers to ‘protect’ them from injury contributes to dependency - and the fear of falling. Many sheltered young people I hear about voluntarily transfer their life-choice decision-making, almost in throwback to the joint family process of yesteryears wherein the head of the family ruled over all aspects of the extended family members lives. Although families in India had since transformed to nuclear, becoming smaller and independent of traditions, in some areas, the social dynamic appears unchanging.

For instance, the allure of ‘love marriages’ (choosing one's own partner) diminishes, perhaps because divorce rates have climbed four thousand percent in India in recent times. In a growing trend, these children look to having their life-partners secured for them by parents instead. Technology has become a hugely useful tool in the burgeoning market of marriage ads. There are specific websites to meet the demands for community, caste, status, looks, ad infinitum. I see the parents of grown sons and daughters avidly trawl Internet to find suitable matches from around the world. As in the corporate industry, SWOT analyses are conducted of individual and family and, in concessions to democracy, a final ‘shortlist’ of candidates made and presented to generation next.

Following the parental spadework, the prospective brides and grooms then venture out dating down the list to discover mutual chemistry. When The One is found, the parents from both sides then meet to hammer out the nitty-gritty between them - including the covert gives-and-takes of dowry - so that marriage along traditional lines might occur with full pomp and pageantry. In the process, the parents and other authority figures find relevance in their own existence.  Otherwise smart and intelligent young people also cultivate the expedience of this generational symbiosis extending continuity with the past. It is perceived a useful allocation of family resources, to collectively prevent mistakes from happening.

My question is whether the continual spoon-feeding allows the children to grow up at all capable of assuming their adult responsibilities, especially to think outside the box in situations unexpected. The children are taught to avoid making mistakes in life, and learn to have little faith in their own choices. The point missing in the remote control is the practice of falling and getting up again. Neither as parents nor as teachers do the elders pass on this crucial art to those in their charge.

An opinion I found on the ’Net says:

To gain admission or be hired at top-tier universities, we have been on a winning streak, earning awards and top grades with ease. We follow the rules to get ahead. We have often forgotten how to fall, much less how to teach others to fall. If we do fall, we carefully hide those failures from students and colleagues to preserve our reputations. As classroom experts, we rarely venture afield to remember what learning by trial and error feels like. …Much of the time we have become entranced with being experts rather than learners—and thus have distanced ourselves from the students we hope to teach.

 

We assume that disappointments with the adult world were more rife in our time, because in those decades, technology did not wipe away boundaries between people or open global avenues of opportunity. I remember that as the youngest member of a joint family, my reality was constantly looking up to others, wanting to follow in their footsteps. For instance, the dance school where older girls went became my goal in life. I dreamed of becoming light as a fairy, graceful as a swan, just like them. The family elders, on the other hand, were obviously counting the monies; their resources stretching thin. They had no incentive to invest in further training that would probably lead nowhere, since, at that time, there were no reality shows to play out competitions on television, hawking lucrative deals to motivate contestants’ guardians. Education, and only education was then the thing, especially for girls! It was left to my mother to break the news to me. Rather than admit the truth, she opted instead to say that it (dance) would lead to ugly fat in later life! That crashing comedown for me, probably affected my perceptions of self and elders thereafter. I always wanted to be a dancer, but somehow felt constrained. 

The mindsets of parental control have changed little even today, and parental aspirations may replace the children’s aptitudes. Because the social environment continues to support total obedience and respect for elders, the younger members feel powerless to rebel against the family authority. They begin to believe it too much to combat attitudes and customs to charter the new course they want in life. Those that cannot conform, learn to be disappointed with the adult world, and suffer low self-esteem on pathways that little interest them. 

In a bus the other day, sudden raised voices attracted attention. I looked over at the commotion to see a young girl, obviously on her way home from school with school-bag and wearing school uniform, standing quietly by an empty seat while a couple of women on either side of her screamed at each other over her. Because both women wanted the seat for themselves, they were each bent on preventing the other from taking it. The teenager caught in between was clearly unimpressed by their antics, and ignored all calls for ‘the poor child’ to take the seat and settle the matter! I found her impassivity curious and got talking to her. She was sixteen and already believed adults, including parents and teachers, were hypocritical. Here was a person in a hurry to grow up and out of their control. 

In real life, she was a high school student living out her parents’ desires of a doctor or engineer in the family, struggling with physics and math, while her heart was in literature and she dreamed of being a writer. She was the budding poet that nobody around her knew about, and sometimes she wrote under a pseudonym to preserve her identity. Her parents, she said, neither knew nor cared about her aspirations. I asked why she didn’t sit down with the adults and talk out what she really wanted to do. No point, she said, they never listen. My father only gets angry and starts shouting.The strain showing on her face expressed far more of her isolation than her words did. She told me she hated going to school, because the teachers spent more time promoting their after-hours tutorials than disseminating knowledge in school. She felt she would probably learn far more from the ’Net than she did by attending their classes. 

Many students say their school counselors are uninterested in their growing pains and merely advise focus on studies, avoiding distractions. It is a sad commentary of our times that despite the new global openness, the choices open to new generations is to either live in dependent relationships or in alienation. Any psychology-based outside help carries social stigma that families avoid like the plague, thus perpetuating the disappointments. The children of today need astute guidance to growing up as levelheaded adults capable of independent decision-making in a rapidly changing world. More than them, it is the parents and teachers that urgently require counseling on the necessity to adapt to the environment. 

The elder generations need to remember their own ordeals of the earlier times, and enable youth of today to negotiate the travails and crises they must encounter in life. Young people must be allowed to explore the environment around them, to make mistakes and to learn from them. They are entitled to truth from the elders, sharing of experience, and independence. It would help them interact freely, and without misconceptions, with the changing global scenario and demographics of diverse groups. Else, they harbour in the corners of their minds unprocessed fears, angers and disappointments that poison perceptions, stunting their development as the people of our future.

What women's dreams foretell

Feminine groups around the world seem to develop organically, and rather like Nature, lack definitive organization. Any exercise to discover the trends finds more diversity. But where they are similar is in dreams. Women’s nighttime experiences are universally vivid and memorable. I imagine dreams are the unconscious confirmation that, beneath diverse surfaces, women are the same.

Everett reports that dream episodes display distinct gender differences. She writes: 

I often dream I'm searching for something in an old, crumbling house, or discovering abandoned rooms in my childhood home. Occasionally, the dreams will become nightmares, featuring bereavement, murder or terrifying chases up spiral staircases. By contrast, my husband tends to have dreams so dull he either doesn’t remember them, or recounts such gems as: ‘I was waiting to buy a new printer cartridge and the receptionist told me to take a seat.' 

Some authors pin women’s remembering dreams on their gender training. Women are taught from childhood to be emotionally attentive, because the maintenance of relationships depends on them. They may thus continue to hone soft skills during sleep, which they recall during wakefulness.

Some other studies seek to explain dreams as the nature of women, the product of the genetic makeup. They are perceived the result of periods of heightened hormonal activity and body temperature. Hence, female hormones contribute to the extreme action categories, the most aggressive dreams appearing in the premenstrual period and in pregnancy.

In my view, and because menopausal women also report similar dreams, rising tides of female hormones during the menstrual cycle may not be solely responsible for nightmares. Instead, violent dreams could stem directly from unresolved stress carried over into sleep states. Thence, they are normal in stressful environments, for women of all ages. Especially in Asia and Africa, where traditions impose on them a secondary status, education is denied them, and female infanticide gets tacit social support. The female gender must serve and obey, while men take all decisions, and boys as young as ten police sisters and mothers.

This uncertainty of being itself would naturally disturb sleep patterns far beyond hormonal biorhythms and learning of gender roles. Their constant need for vigilance would take toll on mind and body, preventing the women from relaxing even at nighttime. Because of the dominations they are constantly subjected to, dreams amongst women trapped in traditions, would be no more than reality revisited.

Across the world, post-feminist women are able to exercise personal choice similar to men. These women have distanced from the choices of their mothers in relationships. They have equated the institution of marriage with gender discriminations of the past. They have sought to be in charge of their own lives, and to negate traditional social learning with liberal new outlooks of self-reliance.

Greenfield writes:

My parents had a terrible marriage, with my father working away a lot and my mother at home with six children, growing increasingly resentful. … it has made me reluctant not just to marry, but to commit fully to a relationship. I’ve always kept a bit back, never daring to make myself financially or emotionally vulnerable.

The women have rendered the marital piece of paper redundant for their chosen lifestyle, investing instead in the lifelong commitment to a shared future. They have preferred to pour energies into having a lovely home, good friends and happy children with their partners, eschewing legalities.

It would then seem logical to assume that liberal environments would largely diminish the dreams, because the extreme stresses ease. Women that have resolved gender issues, and gained equality in the social interface, should also experience male-type change in their dream sequences.

However, in any part of the world, and at any age, women’s continue to dream vividly. Why? I should think that, rather like old wine in a new bottle, the perceived social change remains superficial. Women wanting to escape from the pains of the past have been unable to adequately define equality. The choices taken, based on faulty conceptualization, do little to alleviate traditional fears of vulnerability. And thus generate the unconscious stresses that continue to express in terrifying dreams.

For instance, although Greenfield chooses to live radically different from her mother, her life pans out similar. She becomes precisely what she had sought to avoid – the single parent saddled with child responsibilities. The woman is now left unsupported, while the father of her children, and her soulmate of so many years walks out on the family, citing her lack of respect for him as his reason for doing so.

With the wisdom of hindsight, Greenfield writes:

One thing I do know is this: it’s far easier to separate when you are not married than it is if you are. For a start, there are no lawyers involved. All you have to do is say ‘I want out’, and off you go, which is surely the main reason co-habiting couples are more likely to split up than those who are married.

Many Western women that likewise free themselves of social weddings find out too late that cohabitation does not change mindsets. Their familial responsibilities do not reduce; in the absence of marriage, the increase is manifold. Surveys confirm that the incidence of “divorce” is more than twice higher amongst cohabitating couples when compared with those legally married. 

Post-feminist women may be missing the forest for the trees in their evaluations. The haste to achieve "gender equality" actually hurts women in the future. They appear more focused on the exercise of choice, than to think through all its possible outcomes. Like, its effect on their partners. When the public affirmation of marriage vows is omitted from the equation, men are provided convenient windows of escape as the novelty of the partnerships wane. It is clear that all parties are not on the same page - the men do not perceive oral agreements of long-term commitments as binding.

Firstly, because men are brought up to identify with organization, women’s decisions to step outside of it earn neither respect nor compliance. Secondly, in an organized society, the institution of marriage needs to be appropriately organized too. Rather than demolish the institution of marriage itself, women need to push for changes in legislation that support them. Finally, social ceremonies confirm the social contract; else the individual becomes isolated, outside the social purview. Errant partners are far more likely to conform with pressure from the collective, than to respond to the entreaties of individual women.

Perhaps the point expressed in dreams is that for the women, the habits of dependence persist despite the modern notions of equality. Women have wanted others to be different, but within their self, attitudes resist change. Women anywhere in the world are yet to centre in their universe. Despite “equality”, they continue to perceive themselves as satellites, nurturers and caregivers romantically awaiting rescue from their own decisions while suffering the extreme stress their dreams foretell, just as their sisters under the skin do elsewhere.

References for this post:

1. Everett, Flic. “Why women's dreams are much wilder than men's... who often don't remember them because they are so dull” dailymail.co.uk. Mail Online. 14th September 2011. 
2. Greenfield, Louise. “Like many co-habitees, Louise dismissed marriage as 'just a piece of paper'. Now she admits it would've kept her family from falling apart” dailymail.co.uk. Mail Online. 15^th September 2011. 

Risk: Relying on habit

Synopsis: Persistent ‘risk taking’ is now associated with conditions of stress and mental health problems.


Plagued by uncertainty and indecision, people tend to back risks, especially if they worked in the past.



Job stress

Many thus play ‘safe’ with risks on the job. To de-stress from its pressures, people in increasing numbers also play the odds. These facilitate their eventual preoccupation with winning, or attempting to recouping losses.

For example:

• A survey study of 43,000 Americans found that more than a quarter gambled five or more times a year – from playing cards for money, to buying lottery tickets, and betting on sports games.
• A research on the habits of office workers (Morse, January 2007) found that one in three workers gambles during work time, at least once a week and for at least 15 minutes.
  

The figures are on the rise in other parts of the world as well.

Goal change

The goal sought changes from effective decision-making action to anticipating the pleasures of a win. The attempt to call correct becomes the dependable strategy at work and in life. Failures or losses do not encourage rethinking the underlying premises, but the same strategy and its consequence repeats over and over again.

The habits of risk taking and gambling share the same neural networks in the brain. Hence one can soon lead to the other. A study reported in Forbes showed that continual risk taking could become like a narcotic, a way of coping with the pressure. The degree of anticipation grows with each successive strike, and so does the drive to win.

Rewards in the mind

Persistent ‘risk taking’ is now associated with conditions of stress and mental health problems. People afraid to lose, rely on this decisional process although it neither guarantees nor sustains success. Researchers implicate both individual attitudes and organizational culture in nurturing this type of decision-making.

The repetitive behaviour is a clear pattern of cumulative stress as the ‘rewards’ are only in the mind. Beating the odds to win is the consuming passion – the addiction. It pushes people further into stress and prolongs their fear of the unknown and future uncertainties. Even responsible managers can fall prey to the addiction to winning.

Using resources

The attempt is to control the environment with a reliance on odds. Despite prevailing circumstances, past assumptions about success with standard received wisdom, or best practices in ‘the way things have always been around here’, also remain the same. The preference for the ‘familiar’ stems from the individual and organizational desire to conserve resources.

In unknown situations, the resources needed, like critical thinking and reasoning, are far greater. New knowledge about changing environments helps develop our abilities to adapt to them. Improving adaptation facilitates our learning new ways to combat change and its challenges. We become more equipped and adept at dealing with uncertain times.

Comments/opinions, anyone??

References for ‘Risk’ blogposts:

Are You An Unhealthy Gambler?
Thinking twice [Article no: 84 on website twmacademy.com]

Work-related stress

Risk: Current to future

Synopsis: People prefer ‘risky’ situations to those they consider unknown.


Effective decision-making is hard, as clearly apparent in the global forum. Many of today’s problems result from decisional errors of the past.


Decision steps

The decision making process should logically follow certain steps:

• Defining the current problem
• Analysing the problem
• Developing alternative solutions
• Evaluating alternatives thinking future
• Selecting suitable action contextually
• Implementing the decision
• Following up on action
• Receiving feedback
  

Considering both current needs and future uncertainties helps gear decisions towards the future where their effects will be felt. But people under pressure to perform tend to focus on current outcomes, leaving the future to take care of itself. The variables overlooked generally interfere in time, with goals.

Uncertainty

The new millennium has forced environmental change that includes:

• World disasters
• The general economic climate
• Globalization
• Male/female dynamics

Uncertainty is a part of the new reality. Survey studies conducted even before the current recession showed that more than 50 percent of the companies surveyed were undergoing major changes most of the time, and two out of three people felt a constant uncertainty.

The push for twice the work in half the time, flatter organizations, downsizing and outsourcing, made lay-offs a regular happening through the 1990s. The economic recession begun in the West is now causing massive losses of investments, jobs and even homes in many parts of the world. Work related stress is on the rise – on employees who have to leave, but perhaps more, on those who remain.

Go-getting

People try to deal with the stress by taking more risks. Traditionally, risk taking has been the hallmark of the aggressive businessperson, the fearless buccaneering spirit that achieves the impossible against all odds. Americans, for example, have long been considered “a nation of risk takers” with natural go-getting talent to do anything.

But indiscriminate risk taking actually means “short-circuiting” the decisional process – gambling, in other words. Thus people become unaware of or ignore the uncertainties/challenges of the environment, and of time. The resulting over-stimulation of the reward centres of the brain leads to anticipating the pleasures of immediate success. Much of today’s economic meltdown has resulted from such aggressive overreach.

Two networks

In studies were conducted with experimental betting games, the players could choose bets on two different card decks. One, labelled ‘risky’, contained identified odds. In the other labelled ‘ambiguous’, risks were unidentified. Researchers observed that people prefer to bet on the ‘risky’ deck, and tend to avoid exploring the unknown represented by the ‘ambiguous’ .

Recordings of brain activity showed two distinctly different networks activate in the brain in situations perceived as ‘known’ and ‘unknown’. Player perceptions of the situation is important in determining which specific network is activated.

In situations perceived unknown, twenty-four brain centres are activated including intelligence and emotions. Obviously it takes time and effort to understand and identify challenges. Where risk is perceived already identified, only the reward centres in the brain comes alive with anticipation of a lucky strike.

Cont’d 2…relying on habit

Behaviour: acting for the future

Synopsis: [You might view the earlier post “Behaviour: the power of the hunch” before this.] Emotions make thinking more intelligent. Our ability to intuit then depends on the unique mental wiring connecting our emotions and our general intelligence. Intuition makes us streetsmart savvy, thinking future.

Intuition drives the adaptability to changing environments, with immediate knowledge.

Inhibition and distress

The rationalistic mind blocks this fearing passion. But by inhibiting the emotional livewire, issues are grasped incompletely, choices biased, failures in following through or stereotypical mistakes doing so.

Incompetence with social skills raises anxiety and fear, shrinking working memory. The gut feelings in this case, simply signal organic distress when faced with the unknown!

Thinking intelligent

Our intuition combines experiential learning of the past with the present context. It also guides decisions on the ‘right’ options in problem solving, and regulates changes in behaviour.

The intuitive signals are carried by our emotions, both positive and negative. Emotions thus make thinking more intelligent.

The context

Emotions are of special value in the social context. There are five competencies that build on one another to develop social skills -

• Knowing one’s emotions
• Managing emotions
• Motivating oneself
• Recognizing emotions in others
• Handling relationships

They influence our use of language, the way we perceive others or ourselves and especially, how we confront environmental challenges and adapt to change.

Mental wiring

Utilized at a level below consciousness, intuition combines bits of learned information into new patterns - fast.

Our long evolutionary history makes intuitive thinking a deeply buried power of the mind. It develops spatial associations and helps our adjusting to the environment’s unpredictable changes.

Studies have identified a direct neural link from the centre of emotions (the limbic system) to the centres of reason (the frontal regions) of the brain.

Our ability to intuit then depends on the unique mental wiring connecting our emotions and our general intelligence. It predisposes us to think and act in certain ways.

Streetsmart – thinking future

The value of decision-making lies in the flow of adaptive behaviour - from rapid reading and evaluation of possibilities, to unerring selection of response, and performance suited to situation and context.

Decisions relate to the future and we need educated guesses to make them effective. Intuition makes us streetsmart savvy. We can think according to context, utilizing divergent thinking and non-rational logic to back our hunches.

With the clear inputs of emotions, it also facilitates universal empathy, and the building of positive relationships. We are able to change ourselves and encourage others also to change with us.

Extending power

This innate potential cannot be taught. In times gone by intuitive skills were critically responsible for the physical survival of human life or species. We need to understand and accept our right brain’s astute promptings to guide us through life.

And extend the power of our minds to our psychological and creative planes, so individual and organizational actions in the new global reality are unencumbered by hesitation and doubt.

Comments/opinions anyone??

Behaviour: power of the hunch

Synopsis: We assume that people decide to act only after they have a workable theory. But the emotional livewire may initiate action far sooner.

When exactly do people decide to act? Scientists at the University of Iowa experimented with a simple card game and a polygraph, and found some fascinating results.

The scientific tests

Researchers used two groups of people - “controls” (normal people), and “patients” (people with frontal brain damage).

…the players are given four decks of cards, a loan of $2000 facsimile U.S. bills, and asked to play so that they can lose the least amount of money and win the most. Turning each card carries an immediate reward ($100 in decks A and B and $50 in decks C and D). Unpredictably, however, the turning
of some cards also carries a penalty (which is large in decks A and B and small in decks C and D)...

By the process of turning the cards over, participants can build a concept about the decks, and adjust their play concomitantly.

Understanding

Researchers identified 4 stages in the game play:

1. Pre-punishment - Before encountering losses, both groups behave the same.
2. Pre-hunch – By card 10-20, after encountering losses, stress reaction occurs in ‘controls’. This causes a change in their behaviour.
3. Hunch - By card 50, all of the “controls” express ideas about the ‘wrong’ decks, but none of the “patients” can do so.
4. Conceptual period - By card 80, seven out of ten “controls”, and three out of six “patients” correctly explain the nature of the card game.
   

The two groups clearly show differences in behaviour responses. The controls could rapidly adapt to the game, but not so the patients.

The brain tracks

We use two routes in our brain while thinking –

• The rapid track is the intuitive route. It operates quickly to identify and understand patterns in new situations, which helps us quite unconsciously, to adapt to them.
• The rational route is slow track. Although comparatively delayed it allows a conscious, critical grasp of events through deliberate analysis of the data we receive.

From the findings, we might conclude that brain damage in the patients prevented activation of their unconscious reasoning, and hence their making adjustments to the game.

Change in behaviour

In any situation, our eventual decision-making is influenced by unconscious signals from memory of reward or punishment. This encourages us to change behaviour.

The researchers found that with their losses, all the controls showed stress reactions, like sweaty palms, to the riskier decks. Even before knowing exactly why they were reacting, they began to avoid those decks.

But none of the “patients” had such reactions. Even those who finally formed a correct concept of the game could only continue with their previous behaviour patterns.

Cont’d 2…acting for the future

Effective decisions: the cutting edge

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.

Comments/Opinions Anyone??

Effective decisions: the intelligent ability

Synopsis: The common assumption is that important decisions need the most rationality. But being stuck on ‘logic’ doesn’t guarantee the best choice.


Decisions, important or unimportant, are made throughout the day. The common assumption is that the more important they are, the most rationality is need.

So smart, so dumb

But ‘common assumption’ may be wrong. Psychologists noticed that an academically brilliant politician persistently made whopping errors in functional social relations.

How could somebody so smart be so dumb? Their answer – his ‘intelligence’ lacked the requisite emotional quotient for effective social interactions.

Another intelligence

In other words, being stuck on logic doesn’t guarantee the best choice. Astute decision-making must include ‘intelligence’ of another kind – emotional.

This is defined as the ability to:

• perceive, appraise and express emotions accurately
• access and generate feelings to facilitate cognitive activities
• understand emotion-relevant concepts and use emotion-relevant language
• manage one's own emotions
• manage emotions of others
  

And in the process one promotes growth, wellbeing, and functional social relations between self and others. This, the highly intelligent individual was quite unable to do, and hence his political career sank.

Findings of choice

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam went so far as to hypothesize that routine issues need conscious thought, but those that are vital don’t.

The hypothesis was confirmed in four studies, in the laboratory and also among actual shoppers, on simple and complex consumer purchase choices.

From their experimental findings, the researchers concluded that:

Simple choices…indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but choices in complex matters … should be left to unconscious thought.

Go with gut

That is, quite in reverse to common assumption, unimportant decisions (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) can be thought about rationally.

But important decisions (such as between different houses or different cars) need the assistance of emotions, and inputs from the intuitive mind.

Bottom line – for effective decision-making, it’s better to tune in to gut feelings.

Cont’d 2…the cutting edge