Page 13 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

13 CHAPTER 2 IDENTIFYING THE MESSY MIDDLE

Riders and elephants

There’s a famous analogy used to describe how reason and emotion interact

when we’re making decisions. Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and Professor
of Ethical Leadership at New York University, likens the relationship to that
between an elephant and its rider. The rider is notionally in charge of where
the pair are going, but as soon as some stimulus or other catches the
elephant’s attention, the rider quickly finds out how little control they really
have. The signal of the reins is soon drowned out by the noise of a trumpeting
giant charging towards the fulfilment of one of its primal needs.

Inevitably, the elephant’s motives are something of a mystery to the rider. If

you ask them to explain what happened, they’ll be able to tell you where they
wanted to go, but not why they ended up where they did. Answers about the
elephant will be mostly guesswork and post-rationalisation. The mechanism
that often causes emotion to overhaul reason remains hidden to us.

Many attempts have been made over the years to isolate the signals and
cues most likely to make the elephant take control and, in a sense, the project
we embarked upon had a similar goal. After all, anywhere that has recently

been visited by an elephant tends to end up a little messy.

The mechanism that often

causes emotion to overhaul

reason remains hidden to us.