Why Our Decision-Making Is Influenced By Our Personality And Emotions

Emotions aren’t something to simply be ‘managed, they must be understood

 
If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance of appearing before a judge in a courtroom, pray the judge has had a good night’s sleep and a recent meal. A 2011 study revealed that Israeli Judges hearing parole cases granted 65 percent of requests at the beginning of the day. As the day went on, however, they granted fewer and fewer paroles, until they had a snack break, where the approvals would return to an average of 65 percent.¹
 

Thankfully, most of us won’t find ourselves with our very freedom dependent upon another human being’s eating schedule, but the point here is simply this: When making a decision – any decision – logic and objective reasoning play a far lesser role than how we are feeling. What’s more, even when our bodies are fully resourced – we’ve had our 8 hours of shut-eye, have been exercising regularly, and had our mid-morning apple – we still can’t rely on our objectivity or reasoning when faced with important decisions. This is because we do not see things as they actually are, but only as they are, or were, useful for us to see.

According to perceptual neuroscientist Beau Lotto, “in terms of the sheer number of neural connections, just 10 percent of the information our brains use to see comes from our eyes”². This means that the other 90 percent is our brains trying to make sense of things through the interplay of the physical signals from our bodies and our current emotional state including, but not limited to, our moods, which are constantly being filtered through our own biased belief systems and past experiences. In other words, none of us perceive objective reality, so why do we think we are rational decision-makers?

Frames Aren’t Facts

The frames we use to view the world are biased and limited, developed largely as a response to the stories we grew up in, our temperament, epigenetics, our relationships, and compounded by the stressors of living in a rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable world. As I write about in my book, The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence, the enneagram is a system which explains how we see the world from one of 9 primary personality archetypes. Each of these archetypes has its own unique frames from which it takes in information and makes decisions. These frames are subjective mechanisms from which we try and make sense of the world and overcome and navigate our respective fears, desires, and wounds that gives our personalities their substance. Regardless of which one of these 9 archetypes we most relate to, each of us has deluded ourselves into thinking that they we are seeing things clearly (at least most of the time) and that we are making rational, objectively informed decisions in our day-to-day lives.

Of course, on occasion, each of us makes a hasty decision, fueled by an oversized emotion or unmet need that we eventually regret. In response, we may then over-correct; studying up on strategies for “managing” those pesky feelings to avoid stepping into these emotional pitfalls, so that we don’t wind up sending the proverbial prisoner back to jail just because we are feeling cranky.

But emotions aren’t something to simply be ‘managed” – they must instead be understood. Our feelings aren’t formed to work against us – it is only the lack of understanding of our feelings that works against us. It is when our feelings are repressed, denied, or weaponized that we succumb to potentially harmful and regrettable decisions. However, when we tend to our emotions with non-judgmental curiosity, we begin to understand what our feelings are communicating to us, thereby helping us to better understand the problem we are trying to solve.

Personality-Based Decision Making

The 9 personality archetypes depicted in the enneagram framework are organized within 3 dominant intelligence centers. Enneagram Types 8, 9, and 1 are part of what’s called the “Body” types. These types are more “hands-on” and tactile than the other types. They seek to experience life through their senses. They tend to be very concerned with matters of right versus wrong and are motivated to fix injustices in the world fueled by an often-unconscious anger about a world that is often unfair.

Enneagram Types 2, 3, and 4 are part of the “Heart” center. These types understand the world first and foremost through their emotions. They tend to be highly relational and are the most image-conscious of the personality types. The often-unconscious emotion sitting right below the surface for Heart types is sadness, which originates, in part, from a sense of living at a distance from their most authentic selves, always performing, in one way or another, for the validation of others to compensate for a lack of healthy mirroring as a young person.  
Finally, Enneagram Types 5, 6, and 7 are known as the “Head types”. These types try to make sense of the world through thinking and logic. They tend to be “in their heads” much of the time, often planning and using their imaginations. The often-unconscious emotion sitting right below the surface for these thinking types is fear, which stems from wanting to be certain about things. While we all covet a sense of certainty, these personality types feel more fear than other types over what they cannot predict.

You don’t have to know anything else about the enneagram to appreciate what this framework reveals to us about the inherent bias each of us brings to decision-making, favoring either our gut instincts (the body), our emotions (the heart), or our rational processing (the head), and under-utilizing the other 2, less natural, forms of intelligence. What’s more, distinct in each one of these 9 personality archetypes are 9 different core motivations. Each of these personality type structures are motivated by different desires, rooted in a core fear, particular to that enneagram type (I explain these in detail in my book, “The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence”). Without going into detail here, these 9 different core motivations greatly influence our perspective and bias our decisions even further in accordance with what we believe will offer us the most protection and move us closer to what our personality structure most covets. This can lead us directly into the trap of short-term, self-serving decisions that plague many leaders.

However, when we develop our awareness of our dominant intelligence (head, heart, or gut), and learn how our particular personality type limits our perspective, we can grow our capacity for making better informed, balanced decisions. Developing our awareness is to learn to integrate our physical feelings, emotions, and our cognition in equal measure. It is to acknowledge the natural prejudice of our own egoic personality structure by stepping back and listening to the diverse perspectives of our teams, customers, stakeholders, friends, and families. Awareness is to learn to hold opposites in tension, resisting our brain’s urge to quickly arrange ideas into categories of right/wrong, good/bad.

By creating the space for conflicting views to manifest, and transcending our ego’s default reactivity, we can learn to stay open and ask questions of conflicting information, instead of assigning judgment, giving us the time and space to pay attention to what our gut, heart, and head are truly telling us... And, sometimes, awareness just means learning to eat a sandwich before banging our gavel on the desk.

Notes

1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunchtime-leniency/
2 Book: “Deviate”, p.2, By Beau Lotto

Author Bio

Scott Allender is an expert in global leadership and organizational development. Along with cohosting The Evolving Leader podcast, Scott regularly teaches Enneagram workshops and conducts typing interviews and emotional intelligence assessments for individuals and teams who seek to become more radically self-aware and cognizant of the impact they have on the world.