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The unconscious, emotions, and our decision-making process
Do you make decisions consciously or unconsciously?
Do you view yourself as Mr. Spock when it comes to decision-making? Do you believe that you make decisions based on facts? That you consider relevant facts and make the best decision based on that? Yeah, you do. Right? And I guess you suspect where I am going with this… In this article, I will present some facts that will change the way you think about decision-making, and that are extremely useful when working as a designer.
Susan Weinschenk is a behavioral psychologist and her book 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People was one of the first books I read about the psychology of design. Since then she has been my hero. In one of her online classes, Brain and Behavioral Science, she states that around the year 2000, researchers within the field learned that most of the decisions we make are unconscious. In fact, up to 90% of our decision-making is unconscious. Susan sais that:
“We often like to think that we’re like Mr. Spock in Star Trek, and very rational and logical. But we’re not. And, if you want to really reach people, if you want to communicate with them, if you want to persuade them, you need to figure out how to talk to the unconscious part of their mind.”
Daniel Kahneman has contributed greatly in shaping this new view on decision-making. He is a psychologist that has spent his life working on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on behavioral economics. He is pretty good at what he does in other words, and in his famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow he explains that our brain has two systems. An automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2. Kahneman writes:
“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 on the other hand, allocates attention to the effortful mental…
