Anger is not the best way to approach a big choice-but neither is happiness.. Let’s say you’re making a hard choice, one that could impact your life significantly. Every time you think you’ve settled on something, the other option tugs you back to its side.
Gut instinct
Go with your gut
- “Just do what feels right!” is a safe guidance to offer
- If you nudged the decision-maker toward a huge mistake, at least they’d feel good making it
- Listen to your gut, or your heart, or some other part of your body
Try to make your emotions irrelevant
Lerner recommends making a rubric with every element of a decision that’s important to you
- Assign each factor a weight-2 or.5 and so on-so that all of the factors add up to one
- Score each option based on each dimension, and multiply the weights by the scores to end up a score that reflects the total, impartial assessment of each house’s relative merit
Jennifer Lerner:
In a series of studies she recently published with Christine Ma-Kellams at the University of La Verne in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she found that, in a task where managers were trying to detect an interviewee’s emotions, they assessed the situation more accurately when they thought systematically
- Anger is one of the emotions Lerner and other psychologists understand best
- Where fear breeds uncertainty, anger instills confidence
- Angry people are more likely to put the blame on individuals, rather than society or fate
- They rely on stereotypes and are more eager to act
- This trigger-happy impulse is evolutionarily adaptive
Anger can be beneficial during the primaries
It’s good for voter turnout
- Anger simplifies our thinking
- Americans are angry, and many of them want a brusque, brash leader who will hold the bad guys accountable
- When it comes to actually electing someone, anger confuses more than it helps
- We need to be thinking about very specific policy tradeoffs
- Surprisingly, happiness isn’t much better at inspiring good decisions
- People who are in a positive mood put more faith in the length of a message, rather than its quality, or in the attractiveness or likability of the source
