If you want to take your Emotional Intelligence to the next level, you’d want to understand the Affect Heuristic.
The affect heuristic is a mental shortcut where a person’s current emotions (fear, pleasure, surprise) disproportionately influence their decisions. Instead of objectively weighing the pros and cons, they replace a complex analytical question (“What are the risks and benefits?”) with a simpler intuitive one (“How do I feel about this?”).
When you size up a situation, your intuition quickly pulls a good-or-bad tag from your affect pool, a reservoir of emotional associations built up from memory and lived experience. It’s the fast, automatic processing that Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
System 1 thinking is fine in most situations; our intuition is a remarkable resource and can be surprisingly accurate.
However, the affect heuristic reminds us that our intuition is easily skewed by our current emotions. The same situation can produce a different reaction or conclusion simply because we happened to be tired or distracted rather than calm and focused.
The key is to activate our System 2 thinking when we catch ourselves making quick, rash decisions. System 2 is the slower, effortful mode that does the actual weighing of the facts and the assessment of risks and benefits.
The idea is to notice the feeling first and name it, and then say to yourself, “I’m reacting to how this feels, not to what the evidence says.”
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