We Are Like That Only

 What is common to the two sentences in this conversation? 
“Take an unemotional decision please.” 
“Ok.  I will order a chocolate ice-cream.  But only – and only - if you serve it piping hot (alongwith ginger please).”
 
Quick!  What’s common to these two sentences?
 
Well, for starters, this isn’t an excerpt from a real conversation, but let us imagine it was.  Do you have your answer?  What is common?
Ans: they are both impossible requests. 
(I bet you did not get that right.  I am always doing such things, grrrr.)

For years and years (and years) in the 20^th century, everyone who studied or pretended to know management or economics - or, even worse, both - deluded themselves into thinking that decision making should be ‘unemotional’ (whatever that is).  For much of this time, emotions were also seen as a sort of negative interfering, troublesome lunatic, which we should shred off, a kind of manufacturing defect in constructing homo sapiens.
 
Then, along came an academic, a super bright guy called Herbert Simon, who had done pioneering work in AI, political science and economics (and I am still not done – read the Wiki page on him for a full education).  Herbert-the-Stud said this:
 
Hence, in order to have anything like a complete theory of human rationality, we have to understand what role emotion plays in it.
-- Herbert Simon, 1983, Reason in Human Affairs
 
…and he got a Nobel Prize (not for saying this, but it sort of helped push the idea along, if you see what I mean).
 
Negotiation is a series of judgements and decisions: you decide whether to work or cooperate or agree with someone or not and you make a judgement at various points of the negotiation on what you are getting out of it – your ‘win’, so to speak – and what the other person is likely to be getting out of it too. 

A team (Jennifer Lerner et al) studied all the literature of the last fifty years and wrote up an insightful piece in the Annual Review of Psychology.  On page 1 – right upfront - here is what they say:
The research reveals that emotions constitute powerful, pervasive, and predictable drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices.
 
In the next couple of writeups in the Winfluence Blog, we will understand these emotions more….
 
ps: take an unemotional decision to continue reading the next post, ok?