Question

Article on," how you make decisions and resolve conflicts in life"

Answer 1

Human beings are tasked with making hundreds of choices and decisions daily. Some are relatively simple — Do I want soup or salad for lunch? Should I wear the white shirt or the blue one? But others are so fraught with complications that decision-making can draw out for many restless days and nights.

Making Choices:-

When we think about the many decisions that we make throughout our lives, often a central component of the decision-making process is the emotional conflict that we experience while making the choice. There are a lot of different symptoms for emotional conflicts like increased heart rate, body language, facial expressions and so on. These are observables, so it’s very easy for us to spot others — it could be strangers at a store, family members, managers — who are experiencing a certain amount of choice conflict.

“Our immediate, instinctive reaction toward someone else’s pain and agony over a decision is to empathize with this individual. We’ll start taking this person’s perspective, sharing his emotional states, which leads to what is called greater connectedness or emerging."

When Conflicts Converge:-

We find that pain and conflict bring us closer. Think about many situations where there are certain group dynamics — voting or jury duty, for example — where one wishes to form or build a certain consensus around a certain decision he or she is about to make or has already made. The common wisdom will be to be decisive, right? As a manager or a politician, I need to show decisiveness. This research suggests that in some situations, sharing the emotional conflict that you’re experiencing while making a certain decision would actually be very helpful to build consensus as group members or the team that I’m leading would have a greater tendency to choose like I did.

In one study, we asked group members to cast a vote about a certain decision, a real decision that involved monetary outcomes. What we found is that the voting of the group converged to the voting of the first group member if this person showed conflict while making the choice. So, we see a very interesting group dynamic where one person is very conflicted and how others in the group would converge to the same choice.