Taitology

Waterloo cognitive science professor, Paul Thagard, argues that conscious decisions are made through a combination of logic and emotion. When we approach a decision, we consider the factors that affect our goal in the decision. We assign these factor valences, or emotional connotations. We use the coherence of these factors to select the alternative with the most positive emotional valence, that will get us to the goal.

Paul’s paper, headlined as How to Make Decisions, arrives at a theory on a general approach to making good decisions. Informed Intuition is described as a step-wise procedure.

Informed Intuition
1. Set up the decision problem carefully. This requires identifying the goals to be accomplished by your decision and specifying the broad range of possible actions that might accomplish those goals.
2. Reflect on the importance of the different goals. Such reflection will be more emotional and intuitive than just putting a numerical weight on them, but should help you to be more aware of what you care about in the current decision situation. Identify goals whose importance may be exaggerated because of jonesing or other emotional distortions.
3. Examine beliefs about the extent to which various actions would facilitate the different goals. Are these beliefs based on good evidence? If not, revise them.
4. Make your intuitive judgment about the best action to perform, monitoring your emotional reaction to different options. Run your decision past other people to see if it seems reasonable to them.

Yikes! Basically, he is telling you to understand your emotional intuition towards the decisions. Try describing the factors that are making you feel the way you do.

A crucial part of (group decision making) is becoming aware of the emotional states of others, which may benefit as much from face-to-face interactions involving perception of people’s physical as from purely verbal communication.

I have seen that empathy towards the thoughts and feelings of others, is delicate but crutial to society. I feel that with the rise of individuality, any attempt to understand someone else, especially when they are unable to describe themselves, has been lost. Few but the best leaders appear to have acquired this learned skill.

Are your decisions intuitive and reasonable?