It is certainly not new to you that feelings influence us when it comes to making decisions. How many times have you regretted making decisions in a particular emotional state?You’ve probably realized that you’re more likely to take risks when you’re happy, while sadness has the opposite effect.
Making decisions when we’re angry doesn’t usually work, and neither does the decision when making a decision in times of euphoria. But do you really know how your feelings influence your decisions?Have you ever let yourself be carried away by the first impression of Do you know how manipulative your emotions are to help you make decisions?
- Heuristics is a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
- This process is influenced by emotion (fear.
- Pleasure.
- Surprise.
- Etc.
- ).
- That is.
- The emotional response affects the decision.
- Playing a crucial role in decision making.
It is a process that works under the awareness and shortens decision-making, allowing people to work without having to perform a thorough search for information, this action is performed quickly and involuntarily in response to a stimulus, process that affects the mood for a short time. period of time.
Heuristics often occur when we judge the risks and benefits of something, based on the positive or negative feelings we associate with a stimulus; is the equivalent of acting according to your heart.
Researchers have found that if their feelings about something are positive, they are more likely to judge the risks and overesesy the benefits, while if their feelings about something are negative, they are more likely to overeseses the risks because they are high and give less value. benefits.
To know how heuristics works, let’s look at some practical examples: the first example is so obvious that it seems very simple, the second, perhaps not so much.
For starters, imagine a scene where children go to play in a park, one of the children played for a long time on the swings of his grandparents’ house and, as he loves them very much and has had a lot of fun, there have positive feelings about swings in the park. When you see them, you immediately make the decision to go to the park swings because you think you will have fun despite the risk of dropping the swing (big gain, little risk) and run towards them.
However, another child recently fell off a swing while playing elsewhere and was seriously injured. This child, seeing the balance sheets, thinks it’s a bad choice (little advantage, big risk). Both children took a mental shortcut to decide the pros and cons of climbing on the swings. Neither of us stopped to realistically try to analyze all the benefits and risks, but they made their decision based on a memory.
It seems so simple and so obvious in a child, but adults also act like this in multiple situations where, if one thought by reflex dedicating a little more time to the question, he would make another kind of decision with which he would agree. Then.
In these decisions, heuristics affect the determination of what is considered an advantage or disadvantage. While these mental shortcuts allow people to make accurate decisions quickly and reasonably, they can also lead to poor decision-making.
For example, think about advertising. The marketing techniques used use strategies to make you feel good, awaken your positive emotions, refer to your passions or present yourself with a lifestyle with which you identify or would like to follow.
This makes you more responsive when you buy or pay more for the products and services they offer you, in fact, it works to the point where we may be inclined to buy products thinking they meet a need we don’t really have. In fact, the inability to acquire an object that meets this supposed need can lead to anxiety.
Risks and benefits have been found to have a negative correlation in people’s minds. Research has found that people vote for an activity or technology not only based on what they think about it, but also how they feel about it.
A 1978 study highlighted the important role that heuristics play in decision-making. Researchers found that judgments about benefits and risks are negatively correlated.
In other words, they found that people underestimate risks when they have a more optimistic view of the benefits. The opposite is true: the more we think about the risks, the less we value the potential benefits.
Some behaviors, such as alcohol consumption and smoking, were considered high-risk and low-benefit, while others, such as antibiotics or vaccines, were considered highly beneficial and low-risk.
A little later, in 1980, Robert B. Zajonc stated that affective reactions to stimuli are often the first reaction to occur automatically and subsequently influence the way information is processed and judged.
In 2000, Finucane and others hypothesized that a positive feeling about a situation (i. e. the positive effect) would lead to lower perception of risk and a perception of greater benefit, even when logic does not justify this situation.
In any case, people are far from the rational machine that some aspire to be, whether we like it or not, our mind is prepared and predisposed to make decisions quickly and use only a portion of the information, in fact, many times we make decisions before. we realize that we have done them, and we continue to revolve around something that already has a destiny for us: what we choose.