Another area where emotions enter the picture in a big way is our assessment of
what's risky and what's not risky. So, think to yourself for example, what
are the odds that you would die from different things?
Say, heart attack shark attacks drowning shooting, car accidents, and so on.
And the question is, what makes you believe that you're likely to die from one
thing versus the other? Many years ago Paul Slovic did a study
exactly like that and what he found was that whatever was mentioned in the
newspaper the month before we asked people this question, those are the things that
make them make them believe that they're going to die from them.
So for example, what do you think you're more likely to die from, a falling
airplane, that some airplane would lose some piece of thing, and it would hit you
over the head, or from shark attacks? Most people think shark attacks, right?
Why? Because it's much more salient in our
mind. There are movies about shark attacks.
Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Nobody has made a movie about falling
airplane parts. And because of that, our beliefs about
what's dangerous and not dangerous is actually not coming from the reality of
what's dangerous or not. It comes from our mindset.
What's easy for us to imagine that is dangerous.
On top of that, there's what comes to mind.
And on top of that, there's the question of salience of the emotion.
Not just the ease of coming to mind but the actual emotion.
I grew up in Israel and I go back to visit quite frequently, and every time I go
people ask me if I'm not afraid to go back, and the reality is I'm afraid from
drivers, not from terrorism. But of course people are afraid from
terrorism, not from driving. If you look at the base rate of what the
people are likely to die of, driving is much more likely than terrorism.
But of course terrorism is very different with driving you have the feeling that
you're in control. You're driving, you're making decisions
and so on. Terrorism, it's out of your control.
Somebody's doing it on purpose for you. It's somebody's doing it randomly.
You have nothing to do about it, and because of that the emotion is much, is
much, much higher. And that emotion causes fear to a much
higher degree. Some time I jokingly tell my students that
if they want to get into a good business, a good business could be to sell insurance
against nuclear disasters. Why?
Because people are really, really afraid of nuclear disasters, and they are willing
to pay a lot from it. And on top of that, if it actually
happens, you might not have to pay out. So, there is a question of what things are
we afraid of and how is what we're afraid of actually connected to the base rates to
whats really happening, to our memory of what we, is salient in our memory and
therefore we think it happens and what we're actually afraid of, and what is more
frightening and because of that create higher fear.
As we talk about emotions, we've talked about all emotions and we just put them in
one kind of big bucket, as if all emotions are actually the same.
Now, it's not true that all emotions are the same.
There are many different emotions and different levels of emotions.
There are some emotions that are kind of big emotions, primary emotion arousal,
anger, emotions that come from feeling of hunger and, and things that are kind of
incredibly powerful. And then there are things that are not as
emotional. For example, what happens when you see
somebody else suffering or what happens when you read something, something in a
book. Now, for the, the simplicity of the
discussion, we've bundled them all together.
But, of course, their power, the power of these emotions to work on us depend to
some degree about how primary they are and how basic they are.
And the more primary they are, the more we are going to be able to get our, hijack
our system and get them, get us to do what they, emotions, want in some sense, and
the weaker and most social the emotional are, for example, emotions about
embarrassment and so on, they are going to be less, less powerful.
As a summary, what can we say about emotions?
The first thing we need to recognize is they're inherent part of us.
They're evolutionary, they're the most basic part of us.
Now, in some sense the most true part of ourselves.
We have this cognitive system that we can try to redirect our emotions and behave
differently. But emotions are the basis of human
nature. The second thing we need to understand is
that emotion and cognition don't add up to each other.
When emotion starts acting, it can take over.
It can basically create a whole new set of behaviors, a whole new set of preferences,
and we don't necessarily see it coming. And then on the other side, we need to
understand that emotions are sometimes good and sometimes bad.
Ask yourself, would you like to live in an environment where everybody was without
emotions? No, of course not.
Emotions are incredibly useful but also incredibly dangerous.
And we have this duality and we need to recognize where are the cases where
emotions are useful. For example, when giving are giving to
each other, when people care about reciprocity and they care about honesty,
and they care about be good to other people and we get some pleasure from all
of those things. We also need to recognize the places where
emotions don't get us to act in a particularly useful way and this duality
is crucially important if we actually want to get people to behave well.
So, how do we understand emotions? How do we understand where it works for
us, where it works against us? In trying to get more of it when it's
working for us and less of it when it works against us.
That I think is the main lesson or recipe from emotions to better decision making.