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We like to imagine that important decisions are made by carefully weighing the facts. But decades of research suggest that feelings are not simply interruptions to rational thought. They can influence what we notice, what we value and even which facts seem persuasive in the first place.
A friend sends you a text.
Fine. Do whatever you want.
Six words.
If everything between you has been good lately, you may assume she's busy.
If you argued yesterday, those same six words can acquire approximately seventeen additional paragraphs.
Nothing in the message has changed.
But something in you has.
Most of us like to imagine that we possess two rather different decision-making departments.
There is Reason: sensible, measured, possibly wearing reading glasses and carrying a spreadsheet.
And there is Emotion: impulsive, dramatic and apparently allowed to make major purchases after 10 p.m.
For centuries, versions of this distinction have shaped Western thinking about human judgment.
Reason is supposed to make good decisions.
Emotion gets in the way.
Modern psychology suggests something much more interesting.
The two may never have been separate departments at all.
An Old Argument With a Modern Twist
In his 1999 book Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions, social theorist Jon Elster explored how emotions interact with beliefs, desires and behavior.
Elster wasn't suggesting that emotions always make us wise.
Quite the contrary.
Envy, shame, anger, fear, pride and other emotions can distort judgment spectacularly.
But he also resisted the appealing idea that human behavior could be explained by simple psychological laws.
The same situation can activate different psychological mechanisms in different people—or even competing mechanisms within the same person.
Someone who suffers a disappointment might value what remains more highly.
Someone else might value it less because it now reminds her of what she lost.
Same event.
Different psychological pathways.
Elster's larger point was methodological as much as psychological: if we want to understand why people behave as they do, we often need to understand the mechanism rather than simply observe the outcome.
Nearly three decades of subsequent research have given us much more evidence about one part of that picture.
Emotion isn't merely something that happens after we think. It participates in thinking itself.
Emotion Doesn't Just Make Decisions Louder
A major review of decades of research by psychologist Jennifer Lerner and colleagues concluded that emotions are powerful influences on judgment and choice.
But there was an important complication.
Their effects are not simply:
Positive emotion = good decisions.
Negative emotion = bad decisions.
Different emotions can influence judgment differently—even when both feel unpleasant.
Fear and anger are a good example.
Both are negative emotions.
But fear is often associated with uncertainty and reduced feelings of control. Anger, by contrast, can be accompanied by greater certainty and a stronger sense of control.
Those differences can affect how we perceive risk.
A frightened person may see a situation as more dangerous.
An angry person may become more willing to take a risk.
So asking whether someone is feeling “negative” may tell us surprisingly little.
The more interesting question can be:
What emotion is she feeling—and what is that emotion making the situation look like?
Research increasingly treats emotion not as static background noise but as part of the information-processing environment in which decisions occur.
Sometimes the Feeling Belongs to the Decision
Suppose you're considering whether to accept a new job.
You feel nervous.
That feeling may contain useful information.
Perhaps the job requires moving away from people you love.
Perhaps the financial security isn't quite what you need.
Perhaps something about the workplace genuinely concerns you.
Psychologists sometimes distinguish between integral emotions—feelings arising from the decision itself—and incidental emotions, which originate somewhere else but travel with us into the decision.
That distinction matters.
Being uneasy about the prospective employer may be relevant.
Being furious because someone reversed into your car that morning probably isn't.
Unfortunately, emotions don't arrive wearing name badges explaining where they came from.
And incidental feelings can spill into unrelated judgments.
That's one reason “trust your gut” is incomplete advice.
Sometimes your gut has noticed something important.
Sometimes it hasn't had lunch.
But Removing Emotion Doesn't Necessarily Improve Judgment
This is where the old reason-versus-emotion story encounters an awkward problem.
Research involving people with damage to areas of the brain involved in processing emotional information has historically found something striking.
Some individuals retained many conventional intellectual abilities yet had profound difficulty making effective real-world decisions.
Antonio Damasio and colleagues developed the influential somatic marker hypothesis partly from such observations. The proposal, in simplified form, is that emotional and bodily signals associated with previous experiences can help guide decisions, particularly when choices are complex or uncertain.
Imagine having to consciously calculate every possible consequence of every possible choice.
Which restaurant?
Which job?
Which person do I trust?
Do I cross this road?
Do I continue this conversation?
Emotion can help narrow the field.
A feeling of unease may direct attention toward danger.
Affection can make another person's welfare matter in our calculations.
Regret can influence what we do next time.
Anticipated pleasure can make an option attractive before we've experienced it.
In that sense, feelings may sometimes function less like interference and more like shortcuts through overwhelming complexity.
A Beautiful Theory — With an Asterisk
The somatic marker hypothesis became enormously influential.
It has also been challenged.
Critics have questioned some interpretations of the famous Iowa Gambling Task used to support the theory, including whether participants may consciously understand more about the task than originally assumed and whether bodily responses actually provide the causal mechanism proposed.
Research has continued, and contemporary neuroeconomics still investigates how emotion, bodily states, learning and cognition interact during uncertain decisions. But there is no justification for reducing decades of debate to:
“Science proves you should trust your gut.”
It doesn't.
The more defensible conclusion is both less catchy and more useful.
Effective decision-making often involves emotion and cognition interacting rather than one defeating the other.
The Emotion May Change What the Facts Mean
This brings us back to that six-word text message.
Imagine two women reading:
Fine. Do whatever you want.
One thinks:
She's busy.
Another thinks:
She's angry with me.
Each may then begin gathering evidence.
The first remembers that her friend had an important meeting.
The second remembers three slightly awkward conversations from the previous month.
Both women are reasoning.
Neither is necessarily inventing facts.
But they are organizing the available facts around different interpretations.
This is one of the subtler ways emotion can influence thought.
We sometimes imagine emotional bias as emotion overpowering reason.
But emotion can also influence which information receives our attention, which possibilities come readily to mind, and how ambiguous information is interpreted.
The resulting thought process may feel perfectly rational from the inside.
That doesn't mean every interpretation is wrong.
It means reasoning never takes place in a psychological vacuum.
And Sometimes Emotion Knows Something
There is another reason we shouldn't automatically distrust feelings.
Experience can teach us patterns that are difficult to articulate.
A nurse may feel that something about a patient isn't right before she can identify exactly what changed.
An experienced manager may sense that a negotiation is deteriorating.
A woman may feel uncomfortable during an interaction even though she cannot immediately explain why.
Sometimes those intuitions may reflect accumulated experience.
But expertise matters enormously.
A feeling developed through years of meaningful feedback is different from an intuition about something we barely understand.
And feelings can also reflect stereotypes, previous bad experiences, anxiety or irrelevant associations.
So perhaps the useful question isn't:
“Should I trust my intuition?”
It is:
“What might my intuition be responding to?”
That small change turns a feeling from a verdict into a piece of evidence.
Other People Can Change How We Think
There is an especially interesting development in recent emotion research that would probably have interested Elster.
Psychology traditionally studied emotion regulation largely as something happening inside an individual.
We feel something.
We manage it.
But humans don't regulate emotions only by themselves.
We talk.
We seek reassurance.
We complain.
We ask someone:
Am I overreacting?
And occasionally we call the one friend who will tell us that, yes, we absolutely are.
A growing field studies interpersonal or social emotion regulation—the ways people influence one another's emotional states.
A 2024 commentary by Columbia researchers Ana DiGiovanni and Kevin Ochsner argued that affective science needs to take these social processes much more seriously. And a 2026 Annual Review of Psychology article describes emotion regulation between people as a dynamic process that can improve or worsen feelings and affect the relationship itself.
Research on couples similarly describes emotion regulation as bidirectional and co-regulatory: over time, regulating emotion can become less a matter of “me” and more a matter of “us.”
That makes something very ordinary rather remarkable.
A good conversation may change a decision without supplying a single new fact.
What a Trusted Friend Sometimes Gives Us
Imagine telling a friend about a disagreement at work.
You're furious.
You describe what happened.
She listens.
Then she says:
I understand why you're angry. But do you think she might have meant something different?
No new evidence has entered the room.
Yet something may change.
Your anger falls slightly.
Another interpretation becomes psychologically available.
The email you were about to send suddenly looks rather different.
The friend hasn't necessarily reasoned for you.
She may have helped alter the emotional conditions under which you reasoned for yourself.
That distinction is important.
Human connection isn't valuable merely because other people possess information we don't.
Sometimes another person helps us see information we already possess differently.
Perhaps that is one reason conversations with people we trust can matter so much.
So Should We Sleep on It?
“Never make an important decision when you're emotional” sounds sensible.
It is also impossible.
We're emotional creatures.
A decision about a marriage, child, career, aging parent, friendship or financial future is unlikely to become emotionally neutral simply because we wait until Tuesday.
But intensity can change.
And when an emotion is unusually strong, waiting may allow other information and perspectives to become more accessible.
The objective isn't necessarily to eliminate the emotion.
It may be to identify it.
I'm angry.
I'm frightened.
I'm excited.
I'm embarrassed.
I'm lonely.
I'm exhausted.
Then comes the more interesting question:
What is this feeling telling me—and what might it be making harder for me to see?
That's very different from either obeying the feeling or suppressing it.
It gives emotion a seat at the table.
Just not necessarily the chairperson's seat.
Reason and Emotion May Be Asking Different Questions
Reason can help us ask:
What are the options?
What evidence do I have?
What are the probabilities?
What happened last time?
What are the likely consequences?
Emotion may be contributing different information:
What matters to me?
What frightens me?
What do I value?
What am I hoping to protect?
What feels wrong?
Neither set of questions guarantees a good decision.
But a decision that ignores either may be incomplete.
The difficult art isn't choosing between head and heart.
It is discovering what each is contributing.
Lydia's™ Take
We often praise people for being rational and criticize them for being emotional.
The distinction is understandable.
It just may not describe human beings particularly well.
Jon Elster was writing about the complicated relationship between rationality and emotion more than a quarter-century ago. Modern affective science has supplied new experiments, brain research and theoretical models, but one broad lesson has become increasingly difficult to ignore:
thinking and feeling are deeply entangled.
Emotion can distort judgment.
Fear can magnify danger.
Anger can make us too certain.
Excitement can make risks disappear conveniently into the background.
But emotions can also draw attention to what matters, carry information from experience and help us navigate choices too complicated to calculate from first principles.
And sometimes another person can help us think more clearly simply by helping us feel differently.
Perhaps, then, the goal isn't to become less emotional.
Nor is it to treat every feeling as wisdom.
It is to become a little more curious about the feeling that has joined us at the decision table.
Before asking:
“What should I do?”
there may be another question worth asking first:
“What am I feeling—and what is that feeling helping me see, or preventing me from seeing?”
Reason and emotion may still disagree.
But at least we'll know who is in the room.
Editorial Note
This article discusses psychological research and theories concerning emotion, judgment and decision-making. Individual emotional responses and decision processes vary substantially, and the research described here does not provide a formula for making particular personal, relationship, medical, financial or other consequential decisions.
Research & Trusted Sources
Elster, J. (1999). Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge University Press.
The intellectual starting point for this article. Elster examines emotions through philosophy, history, psychology and social science and argues for explanations based on underlying psychological mechanisms rather than simple universal behavioral laws. The attached edition also includes substantial discussions of social emotions, rationality, and emotional “transmutation” and misrepresentation.
Lerner, J. S., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P., & Kassam, K. S. (2015). “Emotion and Decision Making.” Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 799–823.
A major synthesis of approximately 35 years of research. It concludes that emotions can exert powerful, predictable and context-dependent influences on judgment and choice, sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful.
Annual Review of Psychology article
Gautam, G., Kaur, J., & Moradikor, N. (2025). “Impact of feelings on decision-making (analytical and rational).” Progress in Brain Research, 293, 87–98.
A recent review emphasizing the dynamic interaction between emotion and cognition in intuitive and analytical decision-making, including the effects of fear, excitement, empathy and emotional priming.
PubMed record
Bechara, A. (2004). “The role of emotion in decision-making: evidence from neurological patients with orbitofrontal damage.” Brain and Cognition, 55(1), 30–40.
Reviews neurological evidence underlying the somatic marker hypothesis and the proposition that impaired emotional processing can coexist with relatively preserved conventional cognitive abilities while substantially disrupting real-world decision-making.
PubMed record
Dunn, B. D., Dalgleish, T., & Lawrence, A. D. (2006). “The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 30(2), 272–275.
Important counterweight to overly confident accounts of the somatic marker hypothesis. The authors question interpretations of Iowa Gambling Task findings and argue that causal evidence for some proposed mechanisms remained insufficient.
PubMed record
Lin, C.-H., Huang, J.-T., & Chiu, Y.-C. (2022). “Iowa Gambling Task, Somatic Marker Hypothesis, and Neuroeconomics: Rationality and Emotion in Decision Under Uncertainty.” Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 848603.
Shows that the debate remains active and that findings from the Iowa Gambling Task do not support a simplistic account of emotion reliably guiding long-term advantageous decisions.
Full text via PubMed Central
DiGiovanni, A. M., & Ochsner, K. N. (2024). “Emphasizing the Social in Social Emotion Regulation: A Call for Integration and Expansion.” Affective Science, 5(3), 173–178.
A useful recent contribution arguing that emotion regulation needs to be understood more fully as a social process involving the goals, strategies and outcomes of multiple people rather than solely as an internal individual process.
Full text via PubMed Central
Gable, S. L. (2026). “Dyadic Emotion Regulation.” Annual Review of Psychology, 77, 365–391.
One of the most useful contemporary additions to Elster's older framework. This review integrates relationship science and affective science and examines how people regulate one another's emotions within close relationships, with consequences for both emotional states and relationship dynamics.
Annual Review of Psychology article