How fear affects the decision-making process
“The important thing isn’t to establish whether or not you are afraid, it’s all about making sure that your fear doesn’t condition the way you live.”
_Giovanni Falcone, Italian magistrate.
What is fear? And how does it affect our decisions?
While we may not always be aware of it, fear can play an important role in the way we make (or fail to make) decisions. We often hesitate to choose between different options to avoid the risks involved in making a decision, but doing so also limits the opportunities open to us.
Often, we fail to correctly identify the factors that influence our decision-making process, but if we are able to understand the weight that fear can have on our choices, we can prevent some of its negative effects.
Fear leads to biases and negative behaviours
A series of negative behaviours and biases linked to fear can play an important role in the decision-making process. But why is that?
Generally-speaking, negative events have a greater impact on people than positive events. Our brains perceive difficult situations more intensely and we remember them for longer. Evolution prioritises survival, so recognising and remembering threatening situations has always been an advantage when a mistake could have made the difference between life and death. This has made the brain more reactive to negative stimuli.
Moreover, negative emotions activate more areas of the brain than positive ones, especially the amygdala, the region responsible for fear response and alertness. Consequently, negative stimuli are processed faster and more deeply by the limbic system.
When it’s time to make a decision, negative information weighs more heavily, as it is strongly rooted in our long-term memory.
The bias caused by negativity can also affect the decision-making process by influencing the perception of our abilities. “Imposter syndrome” – a psychological phenomenon that causes self-doubt – can have a long-term impact upon performance. Those who suffer from this syndrome tend to attribute their success to luck or to external factors, minimising their success and feeling a strong sense of insecurity, despite evidence of their accomplishments.
How fear can affect the decision-making process at work
While it makes sense to weigh up the risks and benefits of every situation, in a business context, negative bias can create a risk-averse culture that resists change and innovation, resulting in new demands from the sector and customers being misunderstood and not adequately addressed.
Risk aversion
Risk aversion is closely related to loss aversion, which describes the phenomenon in which people tend to perceive the pain of a possible loss more intensely than the pleasure gained from achieving positive results. (1)
At work, this fear can manifest itself in the form of conduct or habits that are outdated and, in some cases, negative, when change would actually be necessary.
One of the most common examples of this is the fear of the new. In a corporate environment where fear is rooted in the organisational system and the ideas of change and innovation are systematically rejected, especially by management, the domino effect causes employees to hold back when it comes to presenting their ideas and suggesting improvement strategies.
In the professional sphere, and in day-to-day life too, uncertainty is a constant that can generate fear and anxiety, with a significant impact on our decision-making process. Several studies have shown that the anxiety triggered by uncertainty can lead to maladaptive behaviours, such as impulsive decisions or the avoidance of important choices. (2)
The intolerance of uncertainty has also been identified as a contributing factor to anxiety and depression. People with low tolerance of uncertainty can experience high levels of stress and difficulty in making decisions.
Bibliography
- https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/loss-aversion/
- Carleton RN (2016). Into the unknown: a review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty, Journal of Anxiety Disorders, vol. 39, pp. 30–43.
