Emotions and Decision-Making (article summary)

I’ve been asked for a reference regarding the role of emotions in decision-making a few times, so I thought I’d share more widely.

If reading a somewhat dense neurology paper isn’t your thing, I’ve summarized some key points below.

Bechara, A. (2004). The role of emotion in decision-making: Evidence from neurological patients with orbitofrontal damage. Brain and cognition, 55(1), 30-40.

https://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/bechara.pdf

Why do I think this is important to foresight and futures thinking?

Decision-making is often thought of as a process of evaluating risks and benefits and the probability of their occurrences. Meanwhile, the role of emotion in this process is generally ignored or assumed to be detrimental to good decision-making. But as Bechara discusses in this paper, decisions are highly influenced by emotion, in a good way.

Summary:

This study shows that people often rely on “gut feelings” when making choices, especially in unclear or uncertain situations, and by studying patients with damage to the emotional processing regions of the brain, researchers have learned that emotions are just as important as logic in decision-making.

Key Insights:

• Emotions Guide Decisions: People often make choices based on emotional "hunches" when they can't predict the exact outcomes. Patients with certain brain damage struggle to make good decisions, even with normal intelligence.
• Brain Damage and Daily Life: Damage to the brain’s emotional processing areas affect personal and social choices, like planning daily tasks or choosing friends, even though memory and other thinking skills remain strong.
• Emotions and Physical Responses: In a gambling task, both healthy people and the neurological patients showed physical emotional reacts (like sweating) after winning or losing a card draw. However, only healthy participants showed a response before choosing, especially when facing risky options. This finding supports that “gut feelings” or emotional signals help guide more uncertain-higher risk decisions in advance.

Bechara further discusses the somatic marker hypothesis and the “Body Loop” and “As-if-Body Loop”. In short…

·?????? The Body Loop involves a full emotional experience where a physical response (like a gut feeling or sweating) is re-enacted in the body. Signals from this physical reaction are sent back to the brain, influencing decisions either consciously or subconsciously. The body loop becomes more engaged when the decision involves high uncertainty or ambiguity, such as when the likelihood of outcomes is unknown or cannot be easily predicted.

·?????? In the As-If Body Loop a past emotional experience is referenced, but the body does not physically re-enact the emotion. Instead, the brain activates a mental representation or "fainter image" of the body’s response, so the full physiological reaction is bypassed. The as-if body loop is more engaged when decisions are more certain or predictable, where risk is low, and the outcome is clear.

The bottom-line: As foresight practitioners and futures thinkers, we need to embrace emotion in our work, especially considering our work lies deeply in the realm of uncertainty. Emotions get a bad wrap in planning and decision-making, and there is often pressure to keep emotions and hunches at bay in futures work, but that’s just not how our brains function at their best. Rigorous research and gut feelings make for very good friends.