Open Course in Education Futures

How do people decide? Well, at the moment, people make decisions upon self-limited options based on their emotions.

We would like to believe decisions are based on rational discourse. Arguably, the foundation of Western Civilization's modern scientific approach is the desire and ability to engage in informed debate. This is why we do studies to back up our ideas, to provide support for what would otherwise be "just opinion".

The saying goes, if you can't change your mind, how do you know you have one? Yet when most people go on the internet to do research, they seek information to validate their already-formed opinion, not to change their mind. This is because we ARE our decisions. They represent us. To validate our own opinions is to validate ourselves as intelligent (or feeling, or good) people.

This is hardly new in democracies. It is the reason for the conservative view about representation, designed to be a check upon popular opinion.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. -- Edmund Burke, 1774

It is the reason for the Federalist view in the founding of the United States -- direct democracy would mean mob rule, because people don't think things through.

Personal emotion has always been a powerful force in the creation of change, whether we think of people sacrificing their children to war over what they think is right or marching against injustice. I am not saying that emotion is a bad thing -- Rousseau would say it is what makes us human, that rationality is a cold, heartless side to us. Don't think I'm a die-hard rationalist -- so were the social Darwinists who reduced native peoples to the level of animals and Nazi scientists who did experiments on death camp inmates.

But when people not only make decisions based on emotions, but accept (and even glorify) the act of doing so, I think we have a problem. According to historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1964 Pulitzer-prize winning book "Anti-intellectualism in American Life", there is a very long history of trashing the creative and critical (yes, gentlemen, I see both together) and that it occurs in cycles. I think we're in a trough.

Witness the current advertisements of the Republican primary candidates in California's gubernatorial debate. The decision is between a vulture picking dead carrion (Whitman, according to oppponent Poizner's ad) or having cars repeatedly driven off a cliff to crash and burn (Poizner, according to the Whitman campaign). Whitman claims this is an "issues campaign". I'd laugh if it weren't so sickening.

Popular culture glorifies those who make decisions based on unfounded reasoning (see my 2008 blog post on Glorifying the Doofus on my old history blog). Many in our society are riveted by "reality television", watching the emotions of "real" people as they are humiliated or become violent. We have a President who had to be careful during the campaign not to appear too smart, after one who gloried in his ignorance of complex issues (as in his lack of constitutional knowledge when a reporter asked in 1991 whether Congress's authorization was required to unilaterally attack Iraq: said Bush, "I don't think I need it.")

This is one of the reasons I distrust the current "story-telling" trend so popular among some educators and media visionaries (like Alan Levine, whom I admire very much). Story-telling is the way we involve the listener, get them caught up in the narrative, access their emotions. It sways to pendulum more toward the creative than the criticial, as in the case of TwHistory, a project where people use Twitter to "re-enact" historical events (I've examined this approach from a rational historians' perspective in my online teaching blog).

So the answer to "How do people decide?" is "Depends on when you're talking about." At the moment, they decide based on their feelings. This would fit into what the Klein Associates report called "naturalistic" decision-making. According to Karl E. Weick in "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster":
"The role system best able to accept the reality that ignorance and knowledge grow together may be one in which the organizational culture values wisdom." (p. 12).
If this is true, than perhaps my argument about patterns of emotion will indicate something more promising than I think it does.