CareerPrints with Caryn Reddick

This was an interesting weekend for studying how people make decisions. On Sunday night during the live TV broadcast of the MTV awards, Kanye West decided to run on stage and interrupt Taylor Swift while she was accepting the award for best female video. Kanye’s complaint was that Beyonce did not win. In another incident on Saturday, tennis star Serena Williams decided to yell obscenities at a line judge during the semifinal match of the U.S. Open, costing her a win in the match and the opportunity to advance in the tournament.

Maybe we will eventually learn that Kanye’s little outburst was planned on his own or by show organizers. Although highly unlikely, maybe U.S. Open officials will eventually decide they reacted too harshly to Serena’s tirade. Either way, it doesn’t really matter.

The bottom line is that each of these individuals made a decision in the moment to proceed with a course of action that has riled a lot of people and disrupted their lives for the moment. There has been a lot of chatter about how immature it was… how unsportsmanlike it was. Many people are asking how celebrities could do something so rude and thoughtless. How dare they behave so irrationally!

The answer is… yes, they were behaving irrationally… and that actually makes sense.

According to Jonah Lehrer, author of the book How We Decide:

When we make decisions, we are supposed to consciously analyze the alternatives and carefully weigh the pros and cons. In other words, we are deliberate and logical creatures. This simple idea underlies the philosophy of Plato and Descartes; it forms the foundation of modern economics; it drove decades of research in cognitive science. Over time, our rationality came to define us. It was, simply put, what made us human.

There’s only one problem with this assumption of human rationality: it’s wrong. It’s not how the brain works…. It turns out that we weren’t designed to be rational creatures. Instead, the mind is composed of a messy network of different areas, many of which are involved with the production of emotion. Whenever someone makes a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions. Even when a person tries to be reasonable and restrained, these emotional impulses secretly influence judgment.

Think about this:

• What is the difference between deciding to yell obscenities at the driver who just cut you off on the highway versus yelling at a line judge on a tennis court?

• How different is it to decide to complain loudly to your friends about the unfairness of being passed over for the job you wanted versus announcing a perceived slight in front of a live television audience?

All of these are examples of decisions that were made based on emotion. And my guess is that you make a lot of decisions like that, too. The only difference is that your decisions aren’t caught on television and broadcast to millions of people.

I am not trying to justify or judge anyone’s behavior. But I do think these incidents and the aftermath raise some interesting questions, such as:

• Should celebrities be held to a different decision-making standard than the rest of us? If so, why?

• When we behave irrationally, is it a problem or a fact of life?