How Emotions Drive Decisions: A Processing Framework

After much thought, I believe that emotions are the primary driver of human decision-making, operating in a sequential rather than integrated process. When faced with any decision, we tend to elicit an immediate, biological emotional response, and I broadly categorise them in four buckets- indifference, happiness, fear, or anger.

These emotions then undergo some "delayed transitory period of reflection" where these initial feelings either settle into stable drivers of action or fade away. Rather than reason and emotion being intertwined, I see them as fundamentally separate processes where emotion comes first and what we often call "rational" decision-making is actually just emotion that has had time to stabilise and mature through this reflective settling period.

Even seemingly logical decisions are ultimately rooted in emotional responses that have been processed over time, and why it is no wonder that we tend to say that ‘everything settles with time.’ The characteristics we associate with reasoning (being slow, reliable, and logical) describe emotions that have completed this settling process, while impulsive decisions stem from emotions that are still fast, unstable, and haven't had adequate time to stabilise.