Healthy Decision-Making Involves Emotions

This blog post goes out to all those people that seem to think that emotions have no place in decision making. The general premise is that the best decision is one that is made based only on pure logic taking no emotions into account. I hate to break it to you, but that idea is completely and utterly false. It is an absolute fallacy to think that basing all your decisions on logic alone will yield the best possible results; mostly, because good decision-making does and should account for emotional information. As many of you probably would like to believe that you don’t have emotions, allow me the opportunity to inform you that you are probably much more emotionally driven than you think. Anyways, now that I got that out of my system, let’s look at some of the reasons behind why my assertions are true.

1. Taking emotions into account when making a decision is not the same as making an ‘emotional’ decision.

It seems that a lot of the time people try to treat those two things as one in the same. To allow any kind of emotion into decision making is said to be irrational. This is completely false. Seeing that all of us humans have emotions, it is in our best interest to make decisions that keep us emotionally stable and fulfilled. As such, it is absolutely necessary to keep emotions in mind. This means our own emotions and the emotions of others around us.

That being said, it’s obviously not a good idea to make important decisions when we are feeling emotionally ‘turbulent’ or ‘unbalanced’.

2. No one makes decisions based on pure logic completely removed from emotions.

We are not robots. Ergo, we are physically incapable of making decisions with zero emotional influence. Human preservation instincts, greed, envy, anger, fear… They all, in one way or the other, find avenues to influence decisions. This is especially true in those that are insistent that they have no emotions. The claim of being devoid of emotions usually means you are devoid of positive ones, not all. Typically, any emotionally intelligent person can tell when a so-called unemotional person is making an emotional decision, even when the “unemotional” person is convinced that emotions aren’t factoring in.

3. Decision-making without taking any feeling into account ends badly

You want to see what making decisions purely devoid of emotion leads to? Check out basically any movie that features machines taking over and basically enslaving humanity. Matrix and Terminator come to mind. Those machines made decisions devoid of emotions. Those decisions were probably the most logical or most efficient; but come to find out, removing pesky unpredictable humans is usually the most logical choice. (Go figure.) Long story short, purely logical decisions have this tendency to bring human kind to a miserable conclusion that none of us actually want.

You can also see a real life version of this play out when large companies start doing very shady things to improve their bottom line. When using a line of logic that only accounts for ‘how do I make the most money?’, all of a sudden we are putting cocaine in soda to get people addicted to it. Sales have soared! Was it the most logical thing to do to increase profits? Maybe. Does it make logical sense to get all of humanity addicted to cocaine? I think not.

On a more personal level, making decisions for yourself personally that don’t take your emotions into account will make YOU miserable in the long run.

4. Truly logical decisions will keep human emotions and happiness in mind.

A truly logical decision will be a balanced decision. It will take into account both the cold hard facts and the emotional information and balance them to come to a conclusion that creates both happiness and productiveness. It is not a stretch to say any type can strike this balance either. Every type has, at their disposal, both a thinking and a feeling function. Ergo, Fi doms can use Te just like Te doms can use Fi. You are receiving both types of information to your brain whether you want to think you are or not. So, use it, balance your decisions, and keep yourself in check.

In conclusion

Even the most T of us in this community still know that deep down we just want to be happy. It’s a shame that happiness, come to find out, is an emotion. So, why is it that it’s such a point of pride among Thinkers to proclaim that we are devoid of emotions? I suppose it’s more of a blanket statement that is mostly trying to claim that thinkers don’t allow ‘negative’ or ‘weak’ emotions to cloud them. Honestly, seeing some of these people, I would probably disagree with those claims. It frustrates me that this whole thing tries to shed a bad light on feelers and frame them as being in some way illogical. The whole premise of eschewing emotion is illogical in and of itself. There are illogical and irrational Ts and there are illogical and irrational Fs. That is just life. Don’t try to blanket claim that anyone that isn’t a thinker is irrational… I’d even wager that the one making that claim is probably the irrational one anyway…