That Neuroscience Guy - Is Emotional Decision Making "Wrong"? A Neuroscientist's view

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

We often have to balance between making quick, intuitive decisions and slow, analytical decisions. In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind that balance, and when to trust your emotional decisions. 

Hi, my name is Olof Krogolson and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. In my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So yesterday I gave my second TEDx talk. I was at TEDx Victoria and the title of my talk was The Tug of War in the Brain and it was about decision making. Now I'm not going to repeat that talk at this point in time. In hopefully a couple of weeks it'll be on YouTube and I will shout that out to all of you and you can watch me in action and hear what I had to say and then

after it's being released I'll come back to that talk and do a deep dive into it. But the inspiration for today's podcast is after I gave my talk there was a speaker's lounge and I had a lot of people coming up to me and asking me questions. And the basis of those questions is something that was sort of danced around on the podcast, but I really felt like I needed to make a definitive statement on it. So on today's podcast, the tug of war in the brain insights from my TED talk. So like I said, my TED Talk was called

The Tug of War in the Brain. And what do I mean by that? Well, the reality is, first of all, there are multiple tugs of war going on in your brain, and you're familiar with them if you've listened to our other episodes. So in terms of decision making, the first tug of war I want to talk about and the problem I want to address relates to the Kahneman notion of system one versus system two.

If you remember the logic behind this, when we make decisions, there's a working theory that there's two decision-making systems in the brain. There is system one, which is an intuitive, rapid response. It's your gut hunch, and it's typically well learned, and it's telling you this is a decision option. And then there is system two, which is your more analytical and logical decision process. And these two things are at a tug of war, if you will.

System one wants to do something, system two may agree with it, or it may suggest a different decision option. The problem I want to address, because I don't want to go into talking about system one and system two because we've done that on a previous episode, multiple, actually multiple previous episodes, is the notion is system one bad? A lot of people assume that system one and these gut hunch decisions are bad, but is it really? And I'm going to rely on a quote. I don't do this very often, but if you get into the idea of system one decision making

and these intuitive gut hunches, I'd strongly recommend you read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. And the quote I'll use, there's lots of great quotes from the book and it's a great read. But just to paraphrase or summarize what I'm saying, here's the quote, there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis. in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis. And I'll give you an example to support that from the book, but the example, one of the examples I like, the books filled with great examples of when Gut Hunches work is they have,

they're talking about people assessing the value of painting. So they basically glance at a painting and they assess whether it's valuable or not valuable. And then they have people deliberate and do research and come back with an analytical response. And what they found is that the first impressions were often more accurate or just as accurate

as the analytical thought process. So people's just sort of first glance at the thing, you know, they were able to read a lot into it. So I want to emphasize this system one thinking in the tug of war in the brain is not a bad thing. Sometimes your gut hunch is right. And to expand on that a bit further, you have to think about how system one is formed, right? It's through experience. When we're born, we are a tabula rasa, the Latin, a blank slate, right? We don't have system one decision-making responses because we don't have system one. Basically, we start, you know, we have reflexes as babies. We're not talking about that. But in terms of true decisions, flexes as babies, we're not talking about that. But in terms of true decisions,

we don't have these gut hunch intuitive responses because guess what, we have no experience. So our gut hunch experiences, in the case of that painting example, it's based on viewing a lot of paintings and learning their value so that you can very quickly make that assessment. And this applies in a lot of situations.

Another example that I've used ages ago on the podcast, and it's a bit dated now, but I think it was about 10-ish years ago, an Air France flight had an emergency landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport. And basically the plane was just about to touch down and a whole bunch of things failed and When they asked the pilot, you know, what he was thinking and how do you navigate this this, you know

Scenario that could have resulted in the death of a lot of people the pilot basically said well, I've done it so many Times in the simulator. It was just natural. I just did it. And again, that would be a system one response. So I just want to emphasize that system one is not a bad thing. And conversely, system two is not a bad thing. At the same time, you know, analytical thinking isn't bad as well. And I'll come with it. I'm gonna do one more example of the tug of war before I give a definitive answer on this. So there's another tug of war in the brain, which is what my TEDx talk was about,

and like I said, in a couple of weeks, it'll be on YouTube and I'll talk about it on the podcast. But what about analytical versus emotional decision making? So when you've got a logical choice and an emotional choice and the tug of war that occurs there. And again, people would assume that these emotional responses are not right. You should go with your analytical choice and not your emotional choice. analytical choice and not your emotional choice. And again, you can't argue that the emotional response is wrong, just like you can't default

to that system one is wrong. Sometimes your emotional responses are correct. A good example of this that I've struggled with historically but I'm really working hard on is the work-life balance, this idea of career versus a personal life. And like I said, I don't wanna go too much into it because it was the basis for my TEDx talk, but there was a point in my life

where I had to choose between my career and an amazing career, it's actually happened a few times, or make a more emotional choice about my personal life and especially being near my son. And I went with the emotional choice. So you can't argue that emotional choices are wrong because it's this response that you just have because sometimes that initial emotional response, just like the initial system one gut hunch response,

is possibly the correct response, and the analytical thought process might leave you astray. Like you could imagine analytically thinking about your career, if we get back to work life balance, thinking, you know, I need this job and make a lot of money if I stay and work overtime you know I'm gonna get promoted that will lead to more money and I'll have a better house I can buy a better

car I can pay for my kids University and you can come up with this very sort of analytical thought process where you talk yourself into working all the time, but your emotional response might be, well, hey, you know, I want to go see my kids basketball game and to heck with work. And in that case, you know, personally, I would argue that the emotional response is the correct answer and the analytical decision to stay at work for those extra three hours is the incorrect response. And of course, you can't say the analytical thing is incorrect either,

because sometimes you do have to put your, your emotional drive on hold and go with the analytical choice. So I guess that gets me to like, and this is what I was talking to these people about after my talk yesterday, what is the correct answer? Right? Like, you know, what is the right thing to do? Is it system one versus system two, or is it analytical versus emotional? Well, the best decision-making strategy

is to listen to both sides of the argument. You know, if you talk about system one versus system two, what is your gut-hunch response? And remember that, you know, and hold on to that. And at the same time, think to yourself, okay, so the gut hunch response is this, but what is my analytical response? And then evaluate them.

If they both are the same, well then guess what? The decision's straightforward and that's what you do. If they're at odds with each other, then you can work that problem and think to yourself, why are they at odds? This is of of course, also true for analytical versus emotional decisions. Right. You know, listen to your emotional response.

What is it? Listen to your analytical response. And again, if they're both saying the same thing, then you know what you need to do. The decision is straightforward. If the emotional and analytical responses are at odds with each other, then guess what? Again, work the problem and think which one is more right than the other one, because it's probably not going to be a hundred or zero. It might be, you know,

51, 49. And I'll finish with an example that we use in medical education all the time. The medical community sort of lives in a little bit of paranoia, at least the medical education community, about experienced doctors. And the scenario is very, very straightforward. It's late at night, there's a single doctor working the ER, and the doctor gets a clinical case in front of them and they make a gut hunch decision. They go, I've seen this pattern of symptoms before,

this is what it is and they're using pure system one thinking. And what of course they want the doctor to do is go through what's called a differential diagnosis, which is medical speak for analytical decision process, and they want them to do the differential. Well, this is a good example where you need to listen to both. What you want the doctor to do is go, okay, this is my gut hunch based on experience, but I'm also going to do the differential diagnosis. And again, if both these things align, then guess what? We know what we at least we have a good idea of what's wrong with the patient and we'll treat that.

If the two things are at odds, that's where you might step back and reevaluate and say to yourself, okay, well, why are these two things at odds? So this stemmed from a question, a couple of people asked me the same question yesterday, like I said, after my talk. I just want to, you know, it's not the final chapter on decision making in the podcast, but I just want to emphasize when we talk about system one versus system two, both systems are equally right, all right, or possibly equally wrong. If we talk about analytical versus intuitive or emotional decisions, guess what? Both sides are equally right.

So don't assume one is right and one is wrong. And I always love the example. This is one I use as Captain Kirk versus Spock. Old Star Trek, of course. You know, analytical decision making, system two is Spock, emotional, and system one is Captain Kirk. The best commander of the Starship Enterprise

is the two of them together. All right, don't forget to check out the website links to Patreon where you can support the podcast. Thank you so much to those of you that have. The money goes to graduate students in my lab. We have new merch on the Etsy store. Thanks to Jen who's come on board. We have a ton of new merch. Check it out. Again, all the profit from our merch goes to supporting graduate students in my lab. Don't forget to check out Instagram,

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