ISSUE ESSAY

People who make decisions based on emotion and justify those decisions with logic afterwards are poor decision makers.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Decision making is a part and parcel of everyone's life. It is never ending process that defines the survival of people in the world. But what separates a good and a bad decision depends upon the approach used to arrive at a decision.

In a world that is changing so rapidly, a person constantly encounters situations in which he has to take decisions. Decision making is a process in which a person responds to a situation in the best possible manner in order to produce the intended result. It is perceived to be a systematic process where a person thinks about a situation, considers different alternatives available before him, weighs the pros and cons of each alternative, eliminates the ones which have less chances of success and arrives at a conclusion on the alternative to act on so that it leads to the favourable outcome. The decision that a person takes can be based on multiple factors like the awareness of the situation, the ability to think about different ways of solving a problem, past experiences with similar kind of problem, logical and analytical ability, etc. The very basis of decision making is rationality. A decision arrived by using logical skills has higher probability of being successful that those which use emotional faculties.

When a person is presented with a problem, there are two options available- either to react or respond to the situation. The former is the result of emotions and the latter is due to logic. When a person reacts to a situation, he uses emotions and feelings to arrive at a decision. Such decisions are usually the ones that will lead to unlikely outcome. When the person acts as a result of emotions, his ability to think at the moment gets paralysed. He starts associating different emotional angles to the situation. He reacts in the heat of the moment and takes a decision that caters to his moods and feeling and have high chances of alleviating them. There is hardly any rationality involved. He, thus, tries to justify such decisions based on logic but that is clearly forced justification rite with myriad logical fallacies. Such decisions can harm the very person and also the persons involved in the context. To illustrate this, consider a situation where a manager who had a big quarrel at home reaches office and is supposed to solve a business problem in an impromptu meeting. He has high chances of taking decisions based on the present state of mind and his past memory of morning quarrel which can cripple him from taking the correct decision and hence, can end up in incurring huge losses for the firm. Hence, erratic decision making based on emotions can ruin the situation.

In the end, I would that I completely agree that people who make decisions based on emotions and justify those decisions with logic afterwards are poor decision makers. They gainsay the very foundation of logic on which a decision is based.