Decisions and Desire

Decisions and Desire

As a marketer, your main goal is to learn as much as possible about the decision-making process and the drivers behind it. You want to be able to present a product or a service in a manner that appeals to others and essentially triggers their buying process.

However, there has been a lot of holes in our knowledge of what are the main influencers on us and our every-day decision making.

We tend to believe that we are these intelligent, free, rational beings - a veneer of civilization. We also tend to believe that our rationality and objectiveness are directly correlated to our everyday activities and the choices we make. This article (“Decision and Desire”) has a purpose of uncovering what truly lies in the essence of such choices and what really are the drivers behind it.

If we take a look at some of the examples provided within the article we realize that even a simple negotiation like the one described in the first paragraph of the article has a quite unusual explanation. Using the fMRI scans to look into people’s brains while they play this game, the scientist discovered that by offering becoming increasingly unfair, the anterior insula, a part of the animal brain involved in negative emotions including anger and disgust, became more and more active. This came as a novelty to me. I used to believe that anything related to the sense of pride and justice comes from the most modern and intelligent part of our brain and that there is no any other part being involved. But learning that many of our complex decision usually require simultaneous activities of both higher part of our brains as well as the more primitive ones, came as a surprise. This means that the efforts in producing a certain human reaction and activity have to be backed up by peering at the bigger picture and taking into the consideration everything involved in making a certain choice.

Many of other examples found in the article uncover the strong influences of our emotions even though we weren’t aware of it at first place or could even attest that we took a certain decision completely “cold-hearted”.

What science shows us is that, in fact, all of our choices are a constant merging and mixing of primitive brain circuits responsible for feelings of reward and aversion as we make choices.
We have all heard many times that any decision is best made cool-headed and that any feeling should be kept out. What we don’t understand when we say that, is that it would be almost impossible to go about your day and make any mundane decision without emotions. This has been proven through some experiments and backed up by real-life examples, such as the one of a patient named Elliot, explained in the article.
This shows how aggressive and necessary is the involvement of our emotions for even the simplest things we do. They serve as anchors and regulators and often times present us with the opportunity of tapping into our subconscious and experiential knowledge we carry deep within.