thinking that the other guy thinks like you, you’re wrong,” I
say. “That’s not empathy; that’s projection.”
And then I push it even further: Why, I ask, did none of
the proposers offer $1, which is the best rational offer for
them and logically unrejectable for the accepter? And if they
did and they got rejected—which happens—why did the
accepter turn them down?
“Anyone who made any offer other than $1 made an
emotional choice” I say. “And for you accepters who turned
down $1, since when is getting $0 better than getting $1?
Did the rules of finance suddenly change?”
This rocks my students’ view of themselves as rational
actors. But they’re not. None of us are. We’re all irrational,
all emotional. Emotion is a necessary element to decision
making that we ignore at our own peril. Realizing that hits
people hard between the eyes.
In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain,^2 neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained a
groundbreaking discovery he made. Studying people who
had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are
generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in
common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could
describe what they should do in logical terms, but they
found it impossible to make even the simplest choice.
In other words, while we may use logic to reason
ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is
governed by emotion.