There is an interesting article from Jonah Lehrer over at
Wired. He looks at a recent study that asked subjects to predict outcomes for 8 different events - those who people who trusted their feelings were more likely to predict the outcomes.
There are piles of studies showing that people who lack emotions are unable to make decisions. For example,
Antoine Bechara (2004) found that people who have lesions in the ventromedial (which includes the orbitofrontal) area of the prefrontal cortex (the prefrontal cortex is widely understood to be a center for decision-making and long-term planning) suffer from impaired processing of ‘‘somatic’’ or emotional signals with little or no impact on basic cognitive functions (this is his "somatic-marker hypothesis" in decision-making). Bechara found that these people had impaired decision-making skills that compromised the decision quality in their daily lives.
In another paper,
Nasir Naqvi, Baba Shiv, and Antoine Bechara (2006) published an overview of the "somatic-marker hypothesis" - here is the abstract:
Decision making often occurs in the face of uncertainty about whether one’s choices will lead to benefit or harm. The somatic-marker hypothesis is a neurobiological theory of how decisions are made in the face of uncertain outcome. This theory holds that such decisions are aided by emotions, in the form of bodily states, that are elicited during the deliberation of future consequences and that mark different options for behavior as being advantageous or disadvantageous. This process involves an interplay between neural systems that elicit emotional/bodily states and neural systems that map these emotional/bodily states.
For a good overview of the role of emotions in decision making, see
Decision Making, by Seunghee Han and Jennifer S. Lerner in
Oxford Companion to the Affective Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2009). The
Harvard Emotion and Decision Making Group has made most or all of their papers available online as PDFs (open access).
These studies, and many others, offer a little background for the article from Lehrer. References for the two studies above are at the bottom of the page.
For thousands of years, human beings have looked down on their
emotions. We’ve seen them as primitive passions, the unfortunate legacy
of our animal past. When we do stupid things – say, eating too much
cake, or sleeping with the wrong person, or taking out a subprime
mortgage – we usually blame our short-sighted feelings. People commit
crimes of passion. There are no crimes of rationality.
This bias against feeling has led people to assume that reason is
always best. When faced with a difficult dilemma, most of us believe
that it’s best to carefully assess our options and spend a few moments
consciously deliberating the information. Then, we should choose the
alternative that best fits our preferences. This is how we maximize
utility; rationality is our Promethean gift.
But what if this is all backwards? What if our emotions know more than we know? What if our feelings are smarter than us?
While there is an extensive literature on the potential wisdom of
human emotion – David Hume was a prescient guy – it’s only in the last
few years that researchers have demonstrated that the emotional system
(aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions, or those
involving lots of variables. If true, this would suggest that the
unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the
conscious brain, that the very thought process we’ve long disregarded as
irrational and impulsive might actually be more intelligent, at least
in some conditions.
The latest demonstration of this
effect
comes from the lab of Michael Pham at Columbia Business School. The
study involved asking undergraduates to make predictions about eight
different outcomes, from the Democratic presidential primary of 2008 to
the finalists of American Idol. They forecast the Dow Jones and picked
the winner of the BCS championship game. They even made predictions
about the weather.
Here’s the strange part: although these predictions concerned a vast
range of events, the results were consistent across every trial: people
who were more likely to trust their feelings were also more likely to
accurately predict the outcome. Pham’s catchy name for this phenomenon
is the emotional oracle effect.
Consider the results from the American Idol quiz: while
high-trust-in-feelings subjects correctly predicted the winner 41
percent of the time, those who distrusted their emotions were only right
24 percent of the time. The same lesson applied to the stock market,
that classic example of a random walk: those emotional souls made
predictions that were 25 percent more accurate than those who aspired to
Spock-like cognition.
What explains these paradoxical results? The answer involves
processing power. In recent years, it’s become clear that the
unconscious brain is able to process vast amounts of information in
parallel, thus allowing it to analyze large data sets without getting
overwhelmed. (Human reason, in contrast, has a very strict bottleneck
and can only process about four bits of data at any given moment.) But
this raises the obvious question: how do we gain access to all this
analysis, which by definition is taking place outside of conscious
awareness?
Here’s where emotions come in handy. Every feeling is like a summary
of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we
don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a “privileged
window” into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making
predictions about complex events, this extra information is often
essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and
random chance.
How might this work in everyday life? Let’s say, for example, that
you’re given lots of information about how twenty different stocks have
performed over a period of time. (The various share prices are displayed
on a ticker tape at the bottom of a television screen, just as they
appear on CNBC.) You’ll soon discover that you have difficulty
remembering all the financial data. If somebody asks you which stocks
performed the best, you’ll probably be unable to give a good answer. You
can’t process all the information. However, if you’re asked which
stocks trigger the best feelings – your emotions are now being quizzed –
you will suddenly be able to identify the best stocks. According to
Tilmann Betsch, the psychologist who performed this clever little
experiment, your feelings will “reveal a remarkable degree of
sensitivity” to the actual performance of all of the different
securities. The investments that rose in value will be associated with
the most positive emotions, while the shares that went down in value
will trigger a vague sense of unease.
But this doesn’t meant we can simply rely on every fleeting whim. The
subjects had to absorb all that ticker-tape data, just as Pham’s
volunteers seemed to only benefit from the emotional oracle effect when
they had some knowledge of the subject. If they weren’t following
college football, then their feelings weren’t helpful predictors of the
BCS championship game.
The larger lesson, then, is that our emotions are neither stupid nor
omniscient. They are imperfect oracles. Nevertheless, a strong emotion
is a reminder that, even when we think we know nothing, our brain knows
something. That’s what the feeling is trying to tell us.
Papers cited:
Bechara, A. (2004, Jan 29). The role of emotion in decision-making: Evidence from neurological patients with orbitofrontal damage.
Brain and Cognition, 55: 30–40. doi:
10.1016/j.bandc.2003.04.001
Naqvi, N., Shiv, B., and Bechara, A. (2006). The role of emotion in decision making. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(5): 260-264.
Dr. Stephen Porges' 
