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The Role of Emotion in Making Decisions
By jrobertson | April 12, 2010
At ROI, we pride ourselves on collecting quantifiable data to help clients understand situations and make informed decisions. Like many, we subscribe to the motto that “facts are our friends.”
Interestingly though, we see that regardless of what the data says, people still rely on their emotions when making decisions. This isn’t just limited to communications. If you look around, you can see plenty of that actions contradict what the facts says should happen.
Well, it turns out that this is simply human nature and that we are wired to use our emotions when making decisions. In fact, we have two sections in our brains called the amygdalae whose sole purpose is to fuel our decisions with emotion.
Furthermore, in a study of risk and decision making, researchers found that even when people are presented with odds of success, they still chose riskier options, even when the odds say there was a greater chance of loss.
So, should we abandon data-based decision making and just go with our gut tells us to do? Hardly.
The key is to understand the role that emotion plays, and build your strategy to leverage it. Obviously, what you present and how you present it is key. In addition to the quantitative stuff, you need to pull in other types of information to build your story. Qualitative information like quotes and first-hand observational data are great ways to produce the desired emotional reaction. Combine these with the data and you have a recipe for success. Here’s a hypothetical example of how this would work:
Let’s say you conduct a readership survey of the company magazine.. The results show that 55% of employees don’t find the company magazine a valuable source of information. You want to recommend cancelling the magazine, but it has a 15 year history, so you anticipate some resistance. To engage your audience’s emotions, along with the date, you select 3-4 write-in comments that reinforce your findings through the employees’ voice. Finally, you include a full-slide photo that shows the mailroom’s recycling bin filled with unread copies.
The combination of quantitative, qualitative and observational provides your audience with facts, but also produces the emotions necessary to produce the right actions.
The other benefit of using the different sources of information is they can be used to validate each other (i.e., “Does the data match the comments?”) This makes the findings even more compelling.
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