BazermanMoore

When Emotion and Cognition Collide 85
seafaring men to an island—and to their subsequent deaths—by singing sweetly to
them. No man had ever been able to resist the Sirens, and their beach was ‘‘piled with
boneheaps of men now rotted away.’’ Ulysses instructed his men to sail past the Sirens
without stopping and to put wax in their ears to block out the Sirens’ sweet song. Because
Ulysses wanted to hear the Sirens, he told his men to tie him with ropes to the
ship’s mast and ordered them not to release him, no matter how much he begged, until
they had sailed safely by the Sirens. As his ship set sail, he warned his men: ‘‘If I supplicate
you and implore you to set me free, then you must tie me fast with even more
lashings.’’ Ulysses’ plan worked, and his ship passed the Sirens unscathed.
Each one of us faces internal conflicts between what we want to do and what we
think we should do. While Ulysses knew that he should not follow the Sirens’ song,
when he heard them sing he wanted desperately to go to them. Compulsive gamblers
like Mark Merrill want to visit the casinos, but know that they should avoid them because
of the difficulty they have of knowing when to stop. Alcoholics want to drink, but
know that they should abstain because of the likely negative consequences. Students
want to relax and socialize in the evenings, but know they should study. Consumers
must often decide whether to buy the product they want or a product they think they
should purchase for health, environmental, or budgetary reasons.
In Chapter 1, we introduced the affect heuristic (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, &
MacGregor, 2002), which argues that decision makers have an automatic affective, or
emotional, reaction to most options. Bazerman, Tenbrunsel, and Wade-Benzoni (1998)
argue that this emotional response is often in disagreement with the decision that an
individual would make after more thoughtful reasoning. We use the terms ‘‘want’’ and
‘‘should’’ to categorize these two types of preferences. How do individuals come to have
preferences that put them in disagreement with themselves? When does emotion win,
and when does reason win?
Multiple Selves
Schelling (1984) argues that people frequently behave like two individuals: ‘‘one who
wants clear lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a
lean body and another who wants dessert’’ (p. 58). The ‘‘multiple-selves’’ theory has
been used to account for a variety of dysfunctional behaviors, such as alcohol and drug
abuse (Ainslie, 1975), as well as common consumer errors, including the decision to
spend money rather than save it (Loewenstein, 1996). In almost all of these cases, one
of our ‘‘selves’’ is in favor of a decision that provides immediate gratification rather than
an alternative that would provide greater future rewards.
Cognitive neuroscience research suggests that we may actually be able to identify
our multiple selves in different brain regions. Different brain areas are activated when
we consider either immediate rewards we want or larger, delayed rewards we should
choose (McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004). More sophisticated brain
regions are required to combine and integrate these signals. In particular, the prefrontal
cortex seems to be key in the integration of information and decision making
(Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Lee, 1999). People with damage to the prefrontal cortex
have trouble weighing the immediate and long-run benefits necessary for deciding