By Samantha Harrington for Forbes
A month ago, my teammate and I made a really difficult decision while very emotional. Or maybe we made the decision and then got sad. Either way, from the outside it would have looked like fodder for all the Twitter trolls who say women can’t lead because they’re “too emotional.” They’d be wrong.
Looking back, a month removed from the moment we decided to pivot our business strategy, I’m grateful that we didn’t stop up the tear ducts and make a cold, emotionless decision.
But there’s a lot of debate in both psychology and business about the most effective role of emotion in decision making.
A study out of Carnegie Mellon found that when sad, people are willing to pay more money for things and sell things for less money than when their emotions were baseline. The researchers supplied participants with a pack of highlighters, induced different emotions and asked how much participants would sell or buy the highlighters for. The study found that people were willing to pay $1.98 more than at baseline emotion for the highlighters when sad and listed a selling price $2.95 less when sad.
Another study, this one from professors at Case Western, replicated risk by asking participants to choose between two different lottery options– one with a 70% of chance of winning a $2 prize and one with a $25 prize but only a 2% of chance of winning. They manipulated participant’s moods and tracked the lottery choices they preferred. Researchers found that anger and embarrassment led to an increase in risky decisions.
But historically, no major progress has come from a place of apathy and I certainly have made some of the best decisions in my business when I passionate.
So instead of trying to make decisions devoid of emotion, I’m trying to figure out how to best leverage those emotions and the data and facts my business collects to make the most effective decisions.
So here are three tools that I rely on to maintain logical integrity in decisions while keeping my heart in them. They even are effective in checking your emotions that come from outside of work.
Rely on your team: The biggest and simplest way that I check my decision making is by never making solo decisions. That’s the beauty of having a team around you. I can’t imagine how difficult decision making must be for solo founders. When my team is making any decision, much less a major one, we rarely find an immediate consensus. The process of getting to that point — defending your position and understanding other’s perspectives — always keeps us from making a decision that’s not based on evidence.
Take your time: If you have the luxury of time, don’t make a decision that you immediately set into action. Give yourself a couple of days, give yourself a week if you have it, and think about what you’ve decided and why. And if a few days later you think you made the wrong decision, then don’t hesitate to tell your team. Which also brings up the point: do not wait until the last minute to make a major decision.
Get an outside opinion: as essential as it is that your team get on the same page, it’s equally important to turn to a mentor who is removed from the day-to-day of your company. They’ll be able to give you a fresh perspective that’s not clouded by an emotional connection to your work. My team called a former boss of ours (thanks for always answering the phone, John Clark) and started out by saying, “We just need to make sure we’re not making a really dumb decision.” Talking it through with him and explaining out loud how we’d gotten to the decision made us confident in the direction we were taking our company.
Here’s the thing, even if you want to, it’s really difficult to remove your emotions from your decisions. A group of psychologists from top U.S. universities concluded in a 2014 study that, “emotions constitute powerful and predictable drivers of decision making.”
So everyone, and yes Twitter trolls this applies to you too, is making decisions imbued with their personal emotions. And that’s okay. Just make sure that you’re being careful to check that those emotional decisions are also logical.
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For more on emotions and how they affect critical thinking, visit this past blog post
On August 28th 1963, Martin Luther King took centre stage in Washington D.C and delivered one of the finest speeches in recorded history to 250,000 people- 250,000 people willing to listen to the voice of a minority, a voice that challenged the archaic racial view embedded in the masses. One year later President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. The opinion-deviant majority alter-cast or minority influence principle (Moscovici, Lage & Naffrechoux, 1969) accounts for some of history’s defining moments and proposes that if the minority is consistent, confident and committed in their judgement they become effective communicators (Moscovici, 1976). To give a more contemporary example, take Russell Brand- Dave Grohl and Jesus Christ’s cockney, comedian lovechild recently appeared on Newsnight and in the space of 10 minutes delivered one of the most well-articulated, slightly verbose accounts of bullshit ever presented on national television. However, the critical factors of consistency, confidence and commitment in his own argument managed to transform the generic largely politically unconcerned Facebook statuses of the British youth from the tedium of hangover updates and circling reviews to those of fierce aspiring revolutionaries. The point is whether you’re a hippy, conservative, liberal, homosexual, terrorist, freedom fighter, average Joe, anarchist, Pope, white, black, clinically insane, partisan, Christian, Muslim, pagan, masochist, peasant, president, romantic, ladies, gentleman it does not matter, if you have enough belief in an idea you can change the world.Moscovici (1976) demonstrated the effect of minority influence in one of the classic psychological studies. In the control condition a group of up to 6 naïve participants viewed a series of slides depicting various shades of blue. After being shown a slide participants were in turn required to say out loud the colour they had just seen before moving on to the next one. Under such conditions near much everyone identified the slides as being blue meaning the colour of the slide was deemed relatively unambiguous. In two experimental conditions a numerical minority (2/6) of the group were confederates of the experimenter and gave pre-agreed responses (Martin & Hewstone, 2012). Similarly to the control condition when presented with the series of blue slides participants were in turn asked to say aloud the colour they perceived. Confederates responded first and identified the depicted colour as ‘green’, an interpretation which clearly differed to that of the naïve participants. In the ‘consistent-minority condition’ confederates answered with the incorrect ‘green’ response on every trial and those in the ‘inconsistent-minority condition’ deliberately responded incorrectly on 2/3 of all trials. 
Figure 1: a bar chart demonstrating the percentage of green responses by naïve participants in each condition.Results reported that the presence of a minority that consistently provided unusual responses influenced the judgments made by naive participants in that 32% of the consistent-minority condition conformed to the confederate response at least once and as can be deduced from figure 1 18% of all responses in this condition were green . However, the inconsistent minority had virtually no influence over the majority whatsoever, which supports Moscovici et al.’s (1969) claim that consistency is one the keys to minority influence. In summary either we need to confiscate Russell Brand’s thesaurus or wait until he inevitably begins to make contradictory statements before we switch off when he says something he didn’t intend to be a joke- power to the people. Rory MacLeodReferences Martin, R., & Hewstone, M. (2012). Minority influence: Revisiting Moscovici’s blue-green afterimage studies. In J. R. Smith, & S. Alexander-Haslam (Eds.), Social psychology: Revisiting the classic studies (pp. 91-106). London, England: Sage Publications. Moscovici, S., Lage, E., & Naffrechoux, M. (1969). Influence of a consistent minority on the responses of a majority in a colour perception task. Sociometry, 32, 365–379.Moscovici, S. (1976). Social influence and social change. London: Academic Press.