Chapter 10
The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions

Why We Shouldn’t Act on Our Negative Feelings

For better or worse, emotions are fleeting. A traffic jam may annoy, a gift may please, and a stubbed toe will send us into a bout of cursing, but we don’t stay annoyed, happy, or upset for very long. However, if we react impulsively in response to what we’re feeling, we can live to regret our behavior for a long time. If we send a furious e-mail to the boss, say something awful to someone we love, or buy something we know we can’t afford, we may regret what we’ve done as soon as the impulse wears off. (This is why common wisdom tells us to “sleep on it,” “count to ten,” and “wait till you’ve cooled off” before making a decision.) When an emotion—especially anger—gets the best of us, we “wake up,” smack our foreheads, and ask ourselves, “What was I thinking?” In that moment of clarity, reflection, and regret, we often try to comfort ourselves with the idea that at least we won’t do that again.

But can we truly steer clear of repeating the actions we took in the heat of the moment?

HERE’S A STORY of a time when I lost my own temper. During my second year as a lowly assistant professor at MIT, I taught a graduate class on decision making. The course was part of the Systems Designs and Management Program, which was a joint degree between the Sloan School of Management and the School of Engineering. The students were curious (in many ways), and I enjoyed teaching them. But one day, about halfway through the semester, seven of them came to talk to me about a schedule conflict.

The students happened to be taking a class in finance. The professor—I’ll call him Paul—had canceled several of his regular class meetings and, to compensate, had scheduled a few makeup sessions. Unfortunately, the sessions happened to overlap with the last half of my three-hour class. The students told me that they had politely informed Paul about the conflict but that he had dismissively told them to get their priorities in order. After all, he reportedly said, a course in finance was clearly more important than some esoteric course on the psychology of decision making.

I was annoyed, of course. I had never met Paul, but I knew he was a very distinguished professor and a former dean at the school. Since I ranked very low on the academic totem pole, I didn’t have a lot of leverage and didn’t know what to do. Wanting to be as helpful to my students as possible, I decided that they could leave my class after the first hour and a half in order to make it to the finance class and that I would teach them the part they had missed on the following morning.

The first week, the seven students got up and left the room halfway through my class, as we had discussed. We met the next day in my office and went over the material. I wasn’t happy about the disruption or the extra work, but I knew it was not the students’ fault; I also knew that this was a finite arrangement. During the third week, after the group left to attend the finance class’s makeup session, I gave my class a short break. I remember feeling irritated by the disruption as I was walking toward the bathroom. At that moment, I saw my conscripted students through an open door. I peeped into the class and saw the finance professor, who was in the middle of making some point with his hand poised demonstratively in the air.

Suddenly, I felt spectacularly annoyed. This inconsiderate guy had disrespected my time and that of my students and, thanks to his obvious disregard, I had to spend extra time running my own makeup sessions for classes I didn’t even cancel.

What did I do? Well, compelled by my indignation, I walked right up to him in front of all the students and said, “Paul, I’m very upset that you scheduled your makeup session on top of my class.”

He looked baffled. He clearly did not know who I was or what I was talking about.

“I’m in the middle of a lecture,” he said huffily.

“I know,” I retorted. “But I want you to realize that scheduling your makeup sessions on top of my class time was not the right thing to do.”

I paused. He still seemed to be trying to figure out who I was.

“That’s all I wanted to say,” I continued. “And now that I’ve told you how I feel about it, we can just put it behind us and not mention it again.” With that gracious conclusion, I turned around and left the room.

As soon as I left his class, I realized that I’d done something I probably shouldn’t have, but I felt much better.

That night I got a call from Dražen Prelec, a senior faculty member in my department and one of the main reasons I joined MIT. Dražen told me that the dean of the school, Dick Schmalensee, had called him to tell him about the episode. The dean asked whether there was any chance that I would apologize publicly in front of the whole school. “I told him it was not very likely,” Dražen told me, “but you should expect a call from the dean.” Suddenly, memories of being summoned to the school principal’s office when I was a kid came flooding back.

Sure enough, I got a call from Dick the next day and had a meeting with him soon afterward. “Paul is furious,” the dean told me. “He feels violated by having someone else walk into his class and confront him in front of all the students. He wants you to apologize.”

After telling the dean my side of the story, I conceded that I probably shouldn’t have walked into Paul’s class in anger and reprimanded him. At the same time, I suggested that Paul should apologize to me as well, since in spirit he had interrupted my class three times. Soon it became clear to the dean that I was not going to say “I’m sorry.”

I even tried to point out to him the benefit of this situation. “Look,” I told the dean, “you’re an economist. You know the importance of reputation. I now have a reputation for fighting back when someone steps on my toes, so most likely no one will do this to me again. That means you won’t have to deal with this type of situation in the future, and that’s a good thing, right?” The expression on his face didn’t reveal any appreciation for my strategic thinking. Instead, he just asked me to talk to Paul. (The chat with Paul was similarly dissatisfying on both sides, except that he indicated that I might have some kind of social disability and suggested that I needed help understanding the rules of etiquette.)

My first point in telling this tale of academic obstinacy is to admit that I, too, can behave inappropriately in the heat of the moment (and believe it or not, I have more extreme examples of this). More important, the story illustrates an important aspect of how emotions work. Of course, I could have called Paul when the scheduling conflict first became an issue and spoken to him about it, but I didn’t. Why? Partly because I didn’t know what to do in this situation, but also because I didn’t care that much. Aside from the time when the students left my class and when they arrived in my office the following morning for a makeup session, I was fully engrossed in my work, and I didn’t even remember Paul or think about our scheduling conflicts. But when I saw my students leave the class, I remembered I’d have to teach an extra class the next day; then, when I saw them in Paul’s class, it all converged into a perfect storm. I became emotional and did something I shouldn’t have. (I should also confess that I am often too stubborn to apologize.)

Emotions and DECISIONS

In general, emotions seem to disappear without a trace. For example, let’s say that someone cuts you off in traffic on the way to work. You feel angry, but you take a deep breath and do nothing. Soon enough, your thoughts return to the road, the song on the radio, and the restaurant you might go to later that evening. In such cases, you have your own general approach to making decisions (“decisions” in the diagram below), and your momentary anger has no effect on your similar decisions going forward. (The small-d “decisions” on both sides of the emotions in the diagram below signify the transience of the emotions and the stability of your decision-making strategies.)

image

But Eduardo Andrade (a professor at the University of California at Berkeley) and I wondered whether the effects of emotions could still affect decisions we make far into the future, long after the original feelings associated with the stubbed toe, the rude driver, the unfair professor, or other annoyances have worn off.

Our basic logic was this: Imagine that something happens that makes you feel happy and generous—say, your favorite team wins the World Series. That night you are having dinner at your mother-in-law’s, and, while in this great mood, you impulsively decide to buy her flowers. A month later, the emotions of the big win have faded away, and so has the cash in your wallet. It is time for another visit to your mother-in-law. You think about how a good son-in-law should act. You consult your memory, and you remember your wonderful flower-buying act from your last visit, so you repeat it. You then repeat the ritual over and over until it becomes a habit (and in general this is not a bad habit to fall into). Even though the underlying reason for your initial action (excitement over the game) is no longer present, you take your past actions as an indication of what you should do next and the kind of son-in-law you are (the kind who buys his mother-in-law flowers). That way, the effects of the initial emotion end up influencing a long string of your decisions.

Why does this happen? Just as we take cues from others in figuring out what to eat or wear, we also look at ourselves in the rearview mirror. After all, if we are likely to follow other people we don’t know that well (a behavior we call herding), how much more likely are we to follow someone we hold in great esteem—ourselves? If we see ourselves having once made a certain decision, we immediately assume that it must have been reasonable (how could it have been otherwise?), so we repeat it. We call this type of process self-herding, because it is similar to the way we follow others but instead we follow our own past behavior.*

NOW LET’S SEE how decisions engulfed by emotions could become the input for self-herding. Imagine that you work for a consulting company and, among your other responsibilities, you also run the weekly staff meeting. Every Monday morning, you ask each project leader to describe their progress from the previous week, goals for the next week, and so on. As each team updates the group, you look for synergies among the different teams. But since the weekly staff meeting is also the only occasion for everyone to get together, it often becomes a place for socialization and humor (or whatever passes for humor among consultants).

On one particular Monday morning, you arrive at the office an hour early, so you start going through a large pile of mail that has been waiting for you. Upon opening one of the letters, you discover that the deadline has passed for registering your kids for ceramics class. You are upset with yourself, and, even worse, you realize that your wife will blame you for your forgetfulness (and that she will bring it up in many future arguments). All of this sours your mood.

A few minutes later, still highly annoyed, you walk into the staff meeting to find everyone chatting happily about nothing in particular. Under normal circumstances you wouldn’t mind. In fact, you think that some chitchat is good for office morale. But today is not a normal day. Under the influence of your bad mood, you make a DECISION. (I’ve capitalized “DECISION” to signify the emotional component.) Instead of opening the meeting with a few pleasantries, you open the meeting by saying sullenly, “I want to talk about the importance of becoming more efficient and not wasting time. Time is money.” The smiles disappear as you lecture everyone for a minute about the importance of efficiency. Then the meeting moves on to other matters.

When you arrive home that night, you find that your wife is actually very understanding. She doesn’t blame you. The kids have too many extracurricular activities anyway. And all your original worry has dissipated.

But unbeknown to you, your DECISION to stop wasting time in meetings has set a precedent for your future behavior. Since you (like all of us) are a self-herding kind of animal, you look to your past behaviors as a guide. So at the start of subsequent staff meetings, you stop the chitchat, dispense with the pleasantries, and get right down to brass tacks. The original emotion in response to the slipped deadline has long passed, but your DECISION continues to influence the tone and atmosphere of your meetings as well as your behavior as a manager for a long time.

IN AN IDEAL world, you should be able to remember the emotional state under which you DECIDED to act like a schmuck, and you would realize that you don’t need to continue to behave that way. But the reality is that we humans have a very poor memory of our past emotional states (can you remember how you felt last Wednesday at 3:30 P.M.?), but we do remember the actions we’ve taken. And so we keep on making the same decisions (even when they are DECISIONS). In essence, once we choose to act on our emotions, we make short-term DECISIONS that can change our long-term ones:

image

Eduardo and I called this idea the emotional cascade. I don’t know about you, but I find the notion that our DECISIONS can remain hostage to emotions long after the emotions have passed rather frightening. It is one thing to realize how many ill-considered decisions we have made based on our mood—choices that, in perfectly neutral, “rational” moments, we would never make. It is another matter altogether to realize that these emotional influences can continue to affect us for a long, long time.

The Ultimatum Game

To test our emotional-cascade idea, Eduardo and I had to do three key things. First, we had to either irritate people or make them happy. This temporary emotional baggage would set the stage for the second part of our experiment, in which we would get our participants to make a decision while under the influence of that emotion. Then we would wait until their feelings subsided, get them to make some more decisions, and measure whether the earlier emotions had any long-lasting influence on their later choices.

We got our participants to make decisions as part of an experimental setup that economists call the ultimatum game. In this game there are two players, the sender and the receiver. In most setups, the two players sit separately, and their identities are hidden from each other. The game starts when the experimenter gives the sender some money—say, $20. The sender then decides how to split this amount between himself and the receiver. Any split is allowed: the sender can offer an equal split of $10:$10 or keep more money for himself with a split of $12:$8. If he’s feeling especially generous, he might want to give more money to the receiver in a split of $8:$12. If he’s feeling selfish, he can offer an extremely uneven split of $18:$2 or even $19:$1. Once the sender announces the proposed split, the receiver can either accept or reject the offer. If the receiver accepts it, each player gets to keep the amount specified; but if the receiver rejects the offer, all the money goes back to the experimenter, and both players get nothing.

Before I describe our particular version of the ultimatum game, let’s stop for a second and think about what might happen if both players made perfectly rational decisions. Imagine that the experimenter has given the sender $20 and that you are the receiver. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the sender offers you a $19:$1 split, so he gets $19 and you get $1. Since you are a perfectly rational being, you might well think to yourself, “What the heck? A buck is a buck, and since I don’t know who the other person is and I am unlikely to meet him again, why should I cut off my nose to spite my face? I’ll accept the offer and at least wind up $1 richer.” That is what you should do according to the principles of rational economics—accept any offer that increases your wealth.

Of course, many studies in behavioral economics have shown that people make decisions based on a sense of fairness and justice. People get angry over unfairness, and, as a consequence, they prefer to lose some money in order to punish the person making the unfair offer (see chapter 5, “The Case for Revenge”). Following these findings, brain-imaging research has shown that receiving unfair offers in the ultimatum game is associated with activation in the anterior insula—a part of the brain associated with negative emotional experience. Not only that, but the individuals who had stronger anterior insula activity (stronger emotional reaction) were also more likely to reject the unfair offers.23

Because our reaction to unfair offers is so basic and predictable, in the real world of irrational decisions, senders can anticipate more or less how recipients might feel about such offers (for example, consider how you would expect me to react if you gave me an offer of $95:$5). After all, we’ve all had experiences with unfair offers in the past, and we can imagine that we would feel insulted and say “Forget it, you #$%*&$#!” if someone were to suggest a $19:$1 split. This understanding of how unfair offers make people feel and behave is why most people in the ultimatum game offer splits that are closer to $12:$8 and why those splits are almost always accepted.

I should note that there is one interesting exception to this general rule of caring about fairness. Economists and students taking economics classes are trained to expect people to behave rationally and selfishly. So when they play the ultimatum game, economic senders think that the right thing to do is to propose a $19:$1 split, and—since they are trained to think that acting rationally is the right thing to do—the economic recipients accept the offer. But when economists play with noneconomists, they’re deeply disappointed when their uneven offers are rejected. Given these differences, I suspect that you can decide for yourself what kinds of games you want to play with fully rational economists and which ones you would rather play with irrational human beings.

IN OUR PARTICULAR game, the starting amount was $10. About two hundred participants were told that the sender was just another participant, but, in reality, the uneven splits of $7.50:$2.50 came from Eduardo and me (we did this because we wanted to ensure that all the offers were the same and that they were all unfair). Now, if an anonymous person offered you such a deal, would you take it? Or would you give up $2.50 in order to make him lose $7.50? Before you answer, consider how your response might change if I preloaded your thoughts with some incidental emotions, as psychologists call them.

Let’s say you are in the group of participants in the anger condition. You begin the experiment by watching a clip from a movie called Life as a House. In the clip, the architect, played by Kevin Kline, is fired by his jerk of a boss after twenty years on the job. Royally pissed off, he grabs a baseball bat and destroys the lovely miniature architectural models of the houses he’s made for the company. You can’t help but feel for the guy.

After the clip is over, the experimenter asks you to write down a personal experience that is similar to the clip you just watched. You might remember the time when, as a teenager, you worked at a convenience store and the boss unfairly accused you of pilfering money from the till; or the time someone else in the office took credit for a project that you had done. Once you’ve finished your write-up (and the intended gnashing of teeth that the unpleasant memory has aroused), you move to the next room, where a graduate student explains the rules of the ultimatum game. You take a seat and wait to receive your offer from the unknown sender. When you get the $7.50:$2.50 offer a few minutes later, you have to make a choice: do you accept the $2.50 or reject it and get paid nothing? And what about the satisfaction of having avenged yourself on that greedy player at the other end?

Alternatively, imagine that you are in the happy condition. Those participants were somewhat more fortunate, since they started out by watching a clip from the TV sitcom Friends. In this five-minute clip, the whole Friends gang makes New Year’s resolutions that are comically impossible for them to keep. (For instance, Chandler Bing resolves not to make fun of his friends and is immediately tempted to break his resolution when he learns that Ross is dating a woman named Elizabeth Hornswaggle.) Again, after watching the clip, you write down a similar personal experience, which isn’t a problem since you too have friends who try to commit to impossible and amusing resolutions every New Year’s. Then you go into another room, hear the instructions for the game, and in a minute or two, your offer appears: “Receiver gets $2.50, sender gets $7.50.” Would you take it or not?

HOW DID THE participants in each of these conditions react to our offer? As you might suspect, many rejected the unfair offers, though they sacrificed some of their own winnings in the process. But more apropos to the goal of our experiment, we found that the people who felt irritated by the Life as a House clip were much more likely to reject the unfair offers than those who watched Friends.

If you think about the influence of emotions in general, it makes perfect sense that we might retaliate against someone who deals unfairly with us. But our experiment showed that the retaliatory response didn’t spring just from the unfairness of the offer; it also had something to do with the leftover emotions that arose while the participants watched the clips and wrote about their own experiences. The response to the films was a different experience altogether that should have had nothing to do with the ultimatum game. Nevertheless, the irrelevant emotions did matter as they spilled over into participants’ decisions in the game.

Presumably, the participants in the angry condition misattributed their negative emotions. They probably thought something like “I’m feeling really annoyed right now, and it must be because of this lousy offer, so I’m going to reject it.” In the same way, the participants in the happy condition misattributed their positive emotions and may have thought something like “I’m feeling pretty happy right now, and it must be because of this offer of free money, so I’m going to accept it.” And so the members of each group followed their (irrelevant) emotions and made their decisions.

OUR EXPERIMENTS SHOWED that emotions influence us by turning decisions into DECISIONS (no real news here) and that even irrelevant emotions can create DECISIONS. But Eduardo and I really wanted to test whether emotions continue to exert their influence even after they subside. We wanted to discover whether the DECISIONS our happy and angry participants made “under the influence” would be the basis of a long-term habit. The most important part of our experiments was yet to come.

But we had to wait for it. That is, we waited a while, until the emotions triggered by the video clips had time to dissipate (we checked to make sure that the emotions were gone) before presenting our participants with some more unfair offers. And how did our now calm and emotionless participants respond? Despite the fact that the emotions in response to the clips had long passed, we observed the same pattern of DECISIONS as when the emotions were alive and kicking. Those who were first angered in response to poor Kevin Kline’s treatment rejected the offers more frequently, and they kept making the same DECISIONS even when their angry emotions were no longer there. Similarly, those who were amused by the silly situation in the Friends clip accepted the offers more frequently while feeling the positive emotions, and they kept making the same DECISIONS even when the positive emotions dissipated. Clearly, our respondents were calling on their memories of playing the game earlier that day (when they were responding in part to their irrelevant emotions) and made the same DECISION, even though they were long removed from the original emotional state.

How We Herd Ourselves

Eduardo and I decided to take our experiment one step further by reversing the roles of the participants so that they would play the role of senders as well. The procedure was basically as follows: First, we showed the participants one of the two video clips, which created the intended emotions. Then we had them play the game in the role of the receivers (in this game they made DECISIONS influenced by the emotions of the clip) and accept or reject an unfair offer. Next came the delay to allow the emotions to dissipate. Finally came the most important part of this experiment: they played another ultimatum game, but this time they acted as senders rather than receivers. As senders they could propose any offer to another participant (the receiver)—who could then accept it, in which case they would each get their proposed share, or reject it, in which case they would both get nothing.

Why reverse the roles in this way? Because we hoped that doing so could teach us something about the way self-herding works its magic on our decisions in the long term.

Let’s step back for a moment and think about two basic ways in which self-herding could operate:

The Specific Version. Self-herding comes from remembering the specific actions we have taken in the past and mindlessly repeating them (“I brought wine the last time I went to dinner at the Arielys’, so I’ll do that again”). This kind of past-based decision making provides a very simple decision recipe—“do what you did last time”—but it applies only to situations that are exactly the same as ones we’ve been in before.

The General Version. Another way to think about self-herding involves the way we look to past actions as a general guide for what we should do next and follow the same basic behavior pattern from there. In this version of self-herding, when we act in a certain way, we also remember our past decisions. But this time, instead of just automatically repeating what we did before, we interpret our decision more broadly; it becomes an indication of our general character and preferences, and our actions follow suit (“I gave money to a beggar on the street, so I must be a caring guy; I should start volunteering in the soup kitchen”). In this type of self-herding, we look at our past actions to inform ourselves of who we are more generally, and then we act in compatible ways.

NOW LET’S THINK for a minute about how this role reversal could give us a better understanding about which of the two types of self-herding—the specific or the general one—played a more prominent part in our experiment. Imagine you are a receiver-turned-sender. You might have seen poor Kevin Kline’s character being treated like s**t, followed by his bashing of miniature houses with a baseball bat. As a consequence, you ended up rejecting the unfair offer. Alternatively, you might have chuckled in response to the Friends clip and accordingly accepted the uneven offer. In either case, time has passed, and you no longer feel the initial anger or happiness that the movie clip evoked. But now you are in your new role as a sender. (The following is a little intricate, so get ready.)

If the specific version of self-herding was the one operating in our earlier experiment, then in this version of the experiment your initial emotions as a receiver would not affect your later decision as a sender. Why? Because, as a sender, you can’t simply rely on a decision recipe that tells you to “do what you did last time.” After all, you’ve never been a sender before, so you are looking at the situation with fresh eyes, making a new type of decision.

On the other hand, if the general version of self-herding was operating and you were in the angry condition, you might say to yourself, “When I was on the other end, I was pissed off. I rejected a $7.50:$2.50 split because it was unfair.” (In other words, you are mistakenly attributing your motivation to rejecting the offer to its unfairness, rather than to your anger.) “The person I am sending the offer to this time,” you might continue, “is probably like me. He is likely to reject such an unfair offer too, so let me give him something that is more fair—something I would have accepted if I had been in his situation.”

Alternatively, if you had watched the Friends clip, you accordingly accepted the uneven offer (again, misattributing your reaction to the offer and not to the clip). As a sender, you might now think, “I accepted a $7.50:$2.50 split because I felt okay about it. The person I am sending the offer to this time is probably like me, and he is likely to also accept such an offer, so let me give him the same $7.50:$2.50 split.” This would be an example of the general self-herding mechanism: remembering your actions, attributing them to a more general principle, and following the same path. You even assume that your counterpart would act in a similar way.

The results of our experiments weighted in favor of the general version of self-herding. The initial emotions had an effect long after the fact, even when the role was reversed. Senders who first experienced the angry condition offered more even splits to recipients, while those who were in the happy condition extended more unfair offers.

BEYOND THE PARTICULAR effects of emotions on decisions, the results of these experiments suggest that general self-herding most likely plays a large role in our lives. If it were just the specific version of self-herding that was operating, its effect would be limited to the types of decisions we make over and over. But the influence of the general version of self-herding suggests that decisions we make on the basis of a momentary emotion can also influence related choices and decisions in other domains even long after the original DECISION is made. This means that when we face new situations and are about to make decisions that can later be used for self-herding, we should be very careful to make the best possible choices. Our immediate decisions don’t just affect what’s happening at the moment; they can also affect a long sequence of related decisions far into our future.

Don’t Cross Him

We look for gender differences in almost all of our experiments, but we rarely find any.

This is, of course, not to say that there are no gender differences when it comes to how people make decisions. I suspect that for very basic types of decisions (as in most of the decisions that I study), gender does not play a large role. But I do think that as we examine more complex types of decisions, we will start seeing some gender differences.

For example, when we made the situation in our ultimatum game experiment more complex, we stumbled on an interesting difference in the ways men and women react to unfair offers.

Imagine that you are the receiver in the game and you are getting an unfair offer of $16:$4. As in the other games, you can accept the offer and get $4 (while your counterpart gets $16), or you can reject it, in which case both you and the other player get $0. But, in addition to these two options, you can also take one of two other deals:

1. You can take a deal of $3:$3, which means that you both get less than the original offer but the sender loses more. (Since the original split was $16:$4, you would give up $1, but your counterpart would lose $13.) Plus, by taking this $3:$3 deal, you can teach the other person a lesson about fairness.

2. You can take a deal of $0:$3, which means that you get $3 ($1 less than the original offer) but you get to punish the sender with $0—thus demonstrating to the other person what it feels like to get the bum end of the deal.

What did we find in terms of gender differences? In general, it turned out that the males were about 50 percent more likely to accept the unfair offer than the females in both the angry and happy conditions. Things got even more interesting when we looked at what alternative deals the participants took ($3:$3 or $0:$3). In the happy condition, not much happened: the women had a slightly higher tendency to choose the equal $3:$3 offer, and there was no gender difference in the tendency to select the revengeful $0:$3 offer. But things really heated up for the participants who watched the Life as a House clip and then wrote about analogous situations in their lives. In the angry condition, the women went for the equal $3:$3 offer, while the men opted mostly for the revengeful $0:$3 offer.

Together, these results suggest that though women are more likely to reject unfair offers from the get-go, their motives are more positive in nature. By picking the $3:$3 offer over the $0:$3 one, the women were trying to teach their counterpart a lesson about the importance of equality and fairness. Leading by example, they basically told their counterparts, “Doesn’t it feel better to get an equal share of the money?” The men, by contrast, selected the $0:$3 offer over the $3:$3 offer—basically telling their counterparts, “F**k you.”

Can You Canoe?

What have we learned from all of this? It turns out that emotions easily affect decisions and that this can happen even when the emotions have nothing to do with the decisions themselves. We’ve also learned that the effects of emotions can outlast the feelings themselves and influence our long-term DECISIONS down the line.

The most practical news is this: if we do nothing while we are feeling an emotion, there is no short- or long-term harm that can come to us. However, if we react to the emotion by making a DECISION, we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may also create a long-lasting pattern of DECISIONS that will continue to misguide us for a long time. Finally, we’ve also learned that our tendency toward self-herding kicks into gear not only when we make the same kinds of DECISIONS but also when we make “neighboring” ones.

Also, keep in mind that the emotional effect of our video clips was fairly mild and arbitrary. Watching a movie about an angry architect doesn’t hold a candle to having a real-life fight with a spouse or child, receiving a reprimand from your boss, or getting pulled over for speeding. Accordingly, the daily DECISIONS we make while we’re upset or annoyed (or happy) may have an even larger impact on our future DECISIONS.

I THINK ROMANTIC relationships best illustrate the danger of emotional cascades (although the general lessons apply to all relationships). As couples attempt to deal with problems—whether discussing (or yelling about) money, kids, or what to have for dinner, they not only discuss the problems at hand, they also develop a behavioral repertoire. This repertoire then determines the way they will interact with each other over time. When emotions, however irrelevant, inevitably sneak into these discussions, they can modify our communication patterns—not just in the short term, while we’re feeling whatever it is we’re feeling, but also in the long term. And as we now know, once such patterns develop, it’s very difficult to alter them.

Take, for instance, a woman who’s had a bad day in the office and arrives home with a trunkload of negative emotions. The house is a mess, and she and her husband are both hungry. As she enters the door, her husband asks, from his chair by the TV, “Weren’t you going to pick up something for dinner on the way home?”

Feeling vulnerable, she raises her voice. “Look, I’ve been in meetings all day. Do you remember the shopping list I gave you last week? You forgot to buy the toilet paper and the right type of cheese. How was I supposed to make eggplant Parmesan with cheddar cheese? Why don’t you go and get dinner?” Everything devolves from there. The couple gets into an even deeper argument, and they go to bed in a bad mood. Later her touchiness develops into a more general pattern of behavior (“Well, I wouldn’t have missed the turn if you’d given me more than five seconds to switch lanes!”), and the cycle continues.

SINCE IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to avoid either relevant or irrelevant emotional influences altogether, is there anything we can do to keep relationships from deteriorating this way? One simple piece of advice I’d offer is to pick a partner who would make this downward spiral less likely. But how do you do this? Of course, you can avail yourself of hundreds of compatibility tests, from astrological to statistical, but I think that all you need is a river, a canoe, and two paddles.

Whenever I go canoeing, I see couples arguing as they unintentionally run aground or get hung up on a rock. Canoeing looks easier than it is, and that may be why it quickly brings couples to the brink of battle. Arguments occur far less frequently when I meet a couple for drinks or go to their home for dinner, and it isn’t just because they are trying to be on their best behavior (after all, why wouldn’t a couple also try to be on good behavior on the river?). I think it has to do with the well-established patterns of behavior people have for their normal, day-to-day activities (arguing vehemently at the table in front of strangers is pretty much a no-no in most families).

But when you’re on a river, the situation is largely new. There isn’t a clear protocol. The river is unpredictable, and canoes tend to drift and turn in ways you don’t anticipate. (This situation is very much like life, which is full of new and surprising stresses and roadblocks.) There’s also a fuzzy kind of division of labor between the front and back (or bow and stern, if you want to be technical). This context offers plenty of opportunities to establish and observe fresh patterns of behavior.

So if you’re half of a couple, what happens when you go canoeing? Do you or your partner start blaming each other every time the canoe seems to misbehave (“Didn’t you see that rock?”)? Do you get into a huge battle that ends with one or both of you jumping overboard, swimming to shore, and not speaking for an hour? Or, when you hit a rock, do you work together trying to figure out who should do what, and get along as best you can?*

This means that before committing to any long-term relationship you should first explore your joint behavior in environments that don’t have well-defined social protocols (for example, I think that couples should plan their weddings before they decide to marry and go ahead with the marriage only if they still like each other). It also means that it is worthwhile to keep an eye open for deteriorating patterns of behavior. When we observe early-warning signs, we should take swift action to correct an undesirable course before the unfortunate patterns of dealing with each other fully develop.

THE FINAL LESSON is this: both in canoes and in life, it behooves us to give ourselves time to cool off before we DECIDE to take any action. If we don’t, our DECISION might just crash into the future. And finally, should you ever think about scheduling a makeup session on top of mine, remember how I DECIDED to respond last time. I am not saying I would do it again, but when emotions take over, who knows?