EMOTION AND DECISION MAKING

Anyone whose interests he in real-life decision processes is bound to note the oft times disturbing role that emotions play in such processes, particularly in the areas of assessment of information and long-range planning. Instead of simply dismissing emotions as noisome, irrational agents in the decision making process, one needs to obtain an understanding of their nature and how they influence the decision making process in order to acquire better control of them. This paper proposes a model of emotions based primarily on the following assumptions: (1) The whole set of emotions forms a system that is evolutionally developed and generically programmed -a system that serves the purpose of making decisions that are appropriate to the kinds of environments that can be characterized as primitive and wild. The non-emotional, more analytical decision system is a product of a much later period in evolution which, along with other higher cognitive-analytical functions, developed primarily to supplement, but not to replace, the emotion system by covering its shortcomings. Thus, even though these two systems are often in conflict, the cognitive decision system does not operate without the help of the emotion system; without desires, loves, and hates there hardly would be utilities. (3) The first assumption gives rise to the possibility of studying the emotion system as a purposeful, rational decision system in its own right.

2016

A good decision making process is expected, and often required, to be free from emotions. It is done in order to ensure that decision-making is objective. There is a strong belief among decision theorists that objective decision making is unbiased and is more likely to produce good results. This paper discusses some possible effects of emotions on decision making. It also discusses an experiment and its outcome, that was conducted to validate or otherwise, the claimed objectively of decision making being free from emotions. The main outcome of the experiment was the finding that decision-makers achieve better performance in decision making if they are able to control the possible biases produced by their feelings.

2017

The decision-making process has been analyzed in several disciplines (economics, social sciences, humanities, etc.) with the aim of creating models to help decision-makers in strategy formulation. The Organizational theory takes into account both the decision-making process of individuals and groups of a company. Numerous models have been built, which include a wide range of psychological, environmental, hierarchical factors, all of which only account the notion of rationality. In time, such concept has come to be considered pragmatically unrealistic and unachievable. Emotions have recently acquired an increasingly significant position (in the academic and economic society) as important component of the decision making-process. From this point of view neuroscience, the new branch of medical sciences could play a key role in studying individual decision-making processes. This article suggests that thanks to neuroscience it is possible to overcome current limitations in economics studies, for individual's choices, which are exclusively based on the rational component.

Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems, 2007

During the heyday of neo-behaviorism, motivational processes held sway over general system theories of behavior . Basic drives and learned incentive motives were postulated to guide behavior. Theorizing about unobservable mental processes was shunned , was an exception). Such a stilted understanding of mental processing eventually led to the downfall of these grand and systematic theories.

Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems Scientific Journal, 2009

Decision making is traditionally viewed as a rational process where reason calculates the best way to achieve the goal. Investigations from different areas of cognitive science have shown that human decisions and actions are much more influenced by intuition and emotional responses then it was previously thought. In this paper I examine the role of emotion in decision making, particularly Damasio's hypothesis of somatic markers and Green's dual process theory of moral judgment. I conclude the paper with the discussion of the threat that deliberation and conscious rationality is an illusion.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

Decision-making is crucial for an autonomous system. Some work proved that emotions have a link with human decision-making such as Bechara's work presented in or also Lerner's work presented in . The goal is to build an adaptative system mirroring the emotional human behavior as suggested and developed by Cardon [3] to make decisions in an unstable environment with a multiagent system.

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2005

Herbert Simon has warned us that an explanatory account of human rationality must identify the significance of emotions for choice behavior. Customarily emphasizing the cognitive dimensions of decision making, relatively few researchers have paid close attention to specifying the complex ways in which emotion may shape human thinking and decisions. Accordingly, this paper is an attempt to follow Simon's suggestion and specify how emotions can enter into the theory of bounded rationality. To accomplish our task, we capitalize on Rom Harr e's work on causal powers, from which we propose a strategy to study the significance of emotion in decision-making processes. In an attempt to elaborate on an explanation of behavior by mechanism, we discuss a version of bounded rationality recently put forward by Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group [Simple Heuristics that Make us Smart, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999] and Gigerenzer and Selten [Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001, pp. 1-12], the so-called adaptive toolbox of fast and frugal heuristics. Coupled with insights from evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, this version of bounded rationality gives us a better grasp of the functional role of emotions within the human decision machinery.

This paper is about decision making agents in system dynamic models. Decision makers control the rate variables. The decision is made based on the information of the up-and down-stream levels of each rate received at the decision points. Inspired by the similar concepts created for servo-mechanisms, in socioeconomic dynamic systems it is common practice to assume that decisions are made according to a definite law or a guidance table or graph. This deterministic approach is hardly able to model systems in which decisions are taken by humans. Since humans may decide differently in the same conditions not because they are rational but because they, sometimes, decide emotionally. Rationality is assumed to be independent of persons; therefore understandable for all, i.e., the decision maker is always trying to maximize her/his explicit profits by taking decisions that are known to the modeler. On contrary, emotionality is very personal and often leads to un-justifiable decisions. To capture the nature of decisions made by people we have to consider the characteristics and personality of the person who is in charge. This way, the rational decision maker may be replaced by a rational-emotional one. Following efforts to build emotional robots, in this paper an emotional decision maker, which is called sometimes an agent, is integrated into a socio-economic system dynamic model. This agent receives information from the environment and decides in-line with its personality. The environment is being changed by the decisions made. So the agent faces a new condition to decide in. The environment also encourages or punishes the agent by the result of the decisions taken. Therefore, the personality of the agent is a set of dynamic levels under the influences of the environment. However, these levels may accept rapid changes that cannot be given by the integral equations common in socio-economic models. To consider this, emotions are modeled as fuzzy mapping functions. Over longer periods the fuzzy values of the agent's emotions change according to the experiences gained by decisions.

2000

In the decision-making and rationality research field, Rational Decision Theory (RDT) has always been the main framework, thanks to the elegance and complexity of its mathematical tools. Unfortunately, the formal refinement of the theory is not accompanied by a satisfying predictive accuracy, thus there is a big gap between what is predicted by the theory and the behavior of real subjects. Here we propose a new foundation of the RDT, which has to be based on a cognitive architecture for reason-based agents, acting on the basis of their beliefs in order to achieve their goals. In this perspective, the decision process is a cognitive evaluation of conflicting goals, based on different beliefs and values, but also on emotions and desires. We refer to a cognitive analysis of emotions and we integrate them in this more general RDT.