Positive Psychology at Work:

Emotions in Decision-Making

The moral of this story is that effective decision-making is not solely about ‘pure logic’. In fact, it is impossible, in the domain of the personal and social, to make decisions solely on the basis of ‘pure logic’. An emotional component is necessary for effective decision-making. Damasio's theory about how this works is that as we contemplate, even for a microsecond, various future scenarios in relation to the decision we are trying to make, a somatic marker accompanies such images. This feeling, be it so faint as to be undetectable in consciousness, is essentially a summation of all our previous experience or knowledge about that potential choice, expressed as a feeling. As we contemplate various scenarios, fleeting feelings of unease, excitement, keen anticipation, pleasure, distrust, anxiety, and so on, are activated. The unpleasant sensations act as danger signals, the pleasant ones as motivators: somatic markers act to create alarm bells of concern and beacons of incentive. They act as a biasing device. These feelings shape the decision-making landscape.

With somatic markers available the landscape is no longer flat; it contains peaks of attainable good and troughs of avoidable bad. Suddenly decision-making becomes a lot easier with potentially good decisions easier to spot and potentially bad decisions easier to avoid. Indeed, known bad decisions can be discounted. Much of this discounting of options, as indicated by somatic markers, takes place ...