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Think of the last big purchase decision you made. Were you using your head or your heart more (i.e., your logic or your intuitions?)? A mix?
Thinking about the situation you made it in, should you have used System 1 or 2 more? Why?
Can you think of any times that you made purchase decisions while feeling strong emotions? Fear? Anger? Heart-ache? Joy? Disgust? Playfulness?
Do you think that your emotions affected your decision there?

Emotions Guide Behaviour

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  • Emotions guide our behaviours through a 3 step process
    1. ‘Appraising’ the situation (match it to one of a few pre-determined types)
    2. Activating a corresponding emotion
    3. Facilitating relevant behaviour patterns
  • We can have feelings without an appraisal, but these are free-floating moods, or (un)pleasant bodily sensations, not emotions (at least the way psychologists use the word)
  • The Appraisals Tendency Framework lists different causes, attributes and responses to different emotions (mostly to negative ones). For example, sadness is caused by loss, has attributes of low control and certainty, and a response of mourning and being open to change.
  • Broaden and Build theory says that positive emotions trigger us to:
    • Broaden: Try new things (explore, play, etc), and this helps us to:
    • Build: We add new resources (skills, social networks, etc) that can be available even after the mood is over
  • There are times that marketers can have a good guess what emotions consumers are most likely to be experiencing. There are other times where marketers can influence consumer’s emotions (especially in physical shops where there are more sensory cues available)

Feelings also give us information

  • Feelings as Information Theory suggests that feelings are often our default cue for trying to understand our world
  • Our System 1 ‘intuition; can start to spot patterns in even complicated and messy experiences
    • It can communicate these by giving us good or bad feelings about something
    • Learning these patterns requires many cycles of experience with the thing
      • This is common in consumer contexts. Most of us have tried a lot of different products many times in our lives
    • There is evidence that our intuition can provide us better clues to how much we will like different kinds of products (that we have experience with) than a System 2 approach (thinking carefully about our reasons) would
  • Feelings can be tricky to interpret
    • They can’t tell us precisely why we feel them. We have to guess from the context of what is happening in our lives. We can usually do this fairly well, but some situations can make it confusing
    • Emotionally intelligent people may be better at knowing when to listen to their intuition, and when to be more careful and ‘rational’ in their decisions.