Emotions in Decision-Making - Hindrance or Help?

Contents

When Giants Clash

Strong emotions affect the way people remember and deal with events. One of the best examples of this was the emotion-laden, and some said violent, encounter that took place between the philosophers Popper and Wittgenstein. To this day no one can agree what happened between them in a 10 minute meeting on 25th October 1946 at 8.30pm in room H3, the Gibbs Building, King's College, Cambridge.

This is all the more astonishing because the events took place in front of an audience of philosopher academics trained in theories of knowledge, understanding and truth. One of the protagonists - Popper - even got the date of the meeting wrong in his own version of events - a version denounced by a follower of Wittgenstein's as "false from beginning to end".

Did Wittgenstein really threaten Popper with a poker or was he just waving it about to make a point? Some 60 years later, we know the bare facts of time and place but there still is no account of the event which commands universal acceptance.

Strong feelings present problems. We can all feel bruised and sometimes threatened by confrontation and violent words even if they stop short of action. Violent emotions can distort memory and stories about encounters strongly charged with emotion differ amongst those present - each person giving a different version of events.

Emotions Drive Action

In a complainant survey done by me in 2005, a complainant commented that she persisted with her complaint because "my own anger propelled me". The survey was commissioned by the quality director of a London Hospital and looked at the experience of making a formal complaint in an environment where many complaints are pregnant with a powerful emotional charge. How do strong feelings affect both the results we can expect from complainant surveys and the reaction of managers who see the survey report?

Understanding and Managing the Emotional Experience

Is it possible for managers and researchers in complainant satisfaction as they mine deep emotional memories, to understand the experience of complainants and to define what needs to be done to improve that experience?

Complainant research, as we noted at the beginning, is charged with strong emotion. This is particularly true for escalated complaints where the complainant has had to persist and push to get the hearing they feel they deserve. The environment or complaint cause also has a strong influence - a hospital - where the issue may well arise from a death of a close family member. "I sincerely hope that no member of my family or friends is ever admitted to this hospital. Your negligence killed my mother- and to have to watch for 3 months just how shoddy your hospital is run has opened my eyes to a world that I never thought existed. Disgraceful- is what I think".

A Role for Reason?

The more serious the consequences of service error, the greater the need for hospital managers to understand what is going on and make decisions about future process improvements. Organisational decision making is founded on an assumption that rational men and women can come together to make decisions using careful arguments based on fact. They want to be as objective as possible. In this context, do emotions make any sort of contribution or as in the case of the Wittgenstein and Popper meeting, do they just get in the way of a rational assessment of what went on?

How can complainant surveys help to clarify the issues involved and persuade managers and their colleagues of the need for change or indeed maintenance of the status quo?

Dangerous Territory

Strong feelings are one problem. We now face another technical one. Complainant surveys on matters that have been escalated beyond the front line and the initial attempts to resolve often involve relatively small numbers of complainants.

In this case, the sample was drawn from all closed cases in a 17-month period and a sample size of 136 closed cases was achieved with 38 people responding. This is a very small sample.

So now we face two important problems - a small sample and answers given under the influence of strong emotions. This is dangerous territory.

A look at the type of questions and the data gathered may provide us with the beginnings of a map through these difficulties.

The questionnaire used gathered data on a number of areas - the demographic characteristics; the stimulus for the complaint and the story of the experience; judgements based on feelings about the process gone through and future actions like recommending others to complain.

Continued: Understanding Complaints Data

* See the book Wittgenstein's Poker - the story of a ten-minute argument between two great philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow pub Faber and Faber 2001.