Table of Contents for

Designing for How People Think

Chapter 8. Emotion: Logical Decision Making Meets Its Match

Figure 8.1: Portraits of Emotion

Up to now, we’ve treated everyone like they’re perfectly rational and make sound decisions every time. While I’m sure that applies in your case (not!), for most of us there are many ways to systematically deviate from logic, and often using mental shortcuts. When overwhelmed, we default to heuristics and end up “satisficing”, which means picking the best option not through careful decision making and logic, but something that is easy to recall and is about right. 

As psychologists, there is a lot we can say about the study of emotions and their physiological and cognitive underpinnings. I plan to leave more details to some of the great resources at the end of this chapter, but for now let us turn to the more practical.  

As designers, I want you to think about emotions that are critical to product and service design. This does mean the emotions and emotional qualities that are evoked as a customer experiences our products and services. But it also means going deeper, to the customer’s underlying and deep-seated goals and desires (which I hope you will help them accomplish with your product or service), as well as the customer’s biggest fears (which you may need to design around should they play a role in decision making). 

Too much information jamming up my brain!  Too much information driving me insane!

I mentioned Daniel Kahneman earlier in reference to his work on attention and mental effort in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” He shows how, in a quiet room, by yourself, you can usually make quite logical decisions. If, however, you’re trying to make that same decision in the middle of a New York City subway platform at rush hour, with someone shouting in the background and your child tugging at your arm, you’ll be unable to make as good a decision. This is because all of your attention and working memory are being occupied with other things. 

Herbert Simon coined the notion of satisficing, which means accepting an available (easily recallable) option as not the ideal decision or choice, but perhaps satisfactory given the limited cognitive resources available for decision-making at the time. In times when you are mentally taxed, either due to overstimulation or emotions, you often rely on a gut response — a quick, intuitive association or judgment. 

It makes sense, right? Simply having your attention overwhelmed can dramatically affect how you make decisions. If I ask you what 17 minus 9 is, for example, you’ll probably get the answer right fairly quickly. If I ask you to remember the letters A-K-G-M-T-L-S-H in that order and be ready to repeat them, and while holding onto those letters ask you to subtract 8 from 17, however, you are likely to make the same arithmetic errors that someone who suffers from math phobia would produce.  For those who get extremely distraught and emotional thinking about and dealing with numbers, those worries can fill up our working memory capacity and impair our ability to make rational decisions, forcing us to fall back on strategies like satisficing. 

Some businesses have mastered the dark art of getting consumers to make suboptimal decisions. That’s why casinos intentionally overwhelm you with lighting and music and drinks, and make sure clocks and other time cues are nowhere to be found so you keep gambling. It’s why car dealerships often make you wait around for a while, then ask you to make snap decisions for which you either get a car, or nothing. When is the last time a car salesperson asked you to go home and sleep on a deal? I encourage you to do exactly that, so the emotional content is not affecting your decision-making. 

Spock, I am not

With a better understanding of decision-making, you might assume that those who study decision-making for a living (e.g., psychologists and scientists) might make more logical, rational decisions, like Captain Kirk’s stoic counterpart Spock. Like other humans, we have our rational systems competing with our feelings and emotions as we make decisions. Beyond the cerebral cortex lie more primitive centers that generate competing urges to follow our emotional response and ignore the logical. 

Early cognitive psychologists thought about decision-making in simple terms, focusing on all of the “minds” you’ve seen up until now, like perception, semantics, and problem-solving. But they left out one crucial piece: emotion. In his 1984 “Cognition and Emotion,” Joseph LeDoux argued that traditional cognitive psychology was making things unrealistically simple. There are so many ways that we deviate from logic, and so many ways that our lower reptilian brain affects our decision-making. Dan Ariely demonstrates several ways in his book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.” 

This affects us in a myriad of ways. For example, it has been well demonstrated that humans hate losses more than we love gains. “People tend to be risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses,” Ariely writes. Because we find more pain in losing than we find pleasure in winning, we don’t work rationally in economic and other decisions. To intuitively understand this, consider a lottery. You are unlikely to buy a $1 ticket with a possible payoff of $2. You would want the chance to win $10,000, or $100,000, just from that one ticket. You are imagining what it would be like with all that money (a very emotional response), just as picturing losing that $1 and not winning can elicit the feeling of loss. 

Our irrationality, however, is predictable, as Ariely demonstrates. He argues that we are systematic in the ways we deviate from what would be logically right. According to Ariely, “we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They’re systematic and predictable — making us predictably irrational.” 

Competing for conscious attention

Sometimes, your brain is overwhelmed by your setting, like the subway platform example. Other times, it’s overwhelmed by emotions. 

A good deal of research has gone into all of these systematic deviations from logic, which I simply don’t have time to present in this book. But the key point is that in optimal conditions (no time pressure, quiet room, time to focus, no additional stress put on you), you can make great, logical decisions. However, in the real world, we often lack the ability to concentrate sufficiently to make that logical decision. What we do instead is “satisfice” — we make decisions using shortcuts. One of the tools we use in lieu of careful thought includes: “If I think of a prototypical example of this, does the ideal in my mind’s eye match a choice I’ve been given?” 

Imagine yourself in that car dealership negotiating a price. Your two children were as good as gold during the test drive, but they’re getting restless and you’re growing worried that they are going to fall off a chair or knock something over. You are hungry and tired. The salesperson leaves for what seems like an eternity and finally returns with an offer, which has many lines and includes decisions about percentages down, loan rates, options, damage protections, services, insurances, and much more. During the explanation it happens — child #2 falls, and is now crying and talking to you as you hold their fidgeting body and attempt to listen to the salesperson. You simply don’t have the attentional resources to give to the problem at hand (determining if this is a fair deal and which options you want to choose). Instead, you imagine yourself driving on the open road with the sunroof open (far from the car dealership and family) — and that emotional side takes over. 

As product designers, we need to understand both what the rational, conscious part of our mind is seeking (data, decisions they seek to make) as well as what the underlying emotional drivers are for making the decision. It is my hope that you will provide your buyers the information they need and support them in making the best decision for them, rather than seeking to overwhelm and obfuscate in order to drive emotional decision making. Both the rational and emotional are crucial in every decision being made. This is why people who are not salespeople often encourage you to “sleep on it” to make the decision, giving you the time you need to make more informed, less emotional decisions. 

All of these feelings flooding in are subconscious emotional qualities. Just like having your attention overwhelmed on the subway, you now have less of your memory to make good decisions when you’re overwhelmed with emotion. (That’s why as a psychologist, I never let a salesperson sit me in a car that I’m not planning on buying. Seriously, don’t try me.) We all have emotions competing for our conscious resources. When the competition ramps up, that’s how we start to make decisions we regret later. 

Getting to deep desires, goals and fears

When we’re overwhelmed by attention, emotion, or the character of Morpheus offering to show us just how far the rabbit hole goes in “The Matrix,” we tend to end up making an emotional gut decision, throwing logic out the window. We let ourselves be guided by the stereotypes associated with an item in question, casting aside all the factors that we might have wanted to consider in our decision. 

In these moments, we default to heuristics, or simple procedures that help us “find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions,” as Kahneman explains. 

“You have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.” — Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

In an observational study for a client in the credit card industry, I started out by asking consumers innocuous questions about their favorite credit cards. The questions got progressively deeper, as I probed “What are your goals for the next three years?” and “What worries or excites you most about the future?” The session ended in tears and hugs, with respondents saying this was the best therapy session they’d had in a long time. In a series of eight questions, I went from people saying what cards were in their wallet to sharing their deepest hopes and fears. By listening to them, I was able to draw out: 

1. 1. What would appeal to them immediately; 
2. 2. What would enhance their lives and provide more lasting and meaningful value; and 
3. 3. What would really touch some of those deepest goals and wishes they have for life. 

Numbers 1 and 2 are essential to getting to Number 3 — but once you get to Number 3, you’ve got your selling point: The deep, underlying meaning of what it is your product is trying to address for your target audience. This is why many commercials don’t actually feature the product itself until the very end, if at all. Instead, they focus on the feeling or image that the ideal consumer is trying to mirror: successful businesswoman, family man, thrill-seeking retiree, etc. By uncovering (and leveraging) what appeals to your audience immediately, what will help them in the long term, and what will ultimately awaken some of their deepest goals in life, you’ve gone from surface level to their gut reaction level — which can’t be overestimated in the decision-making process.  In the next part of the book we’ll describe how to get there.