Emotions and Planning

Abstract

Planning analysts taught to separate cognitive and emotional qualities of judgment tend to study cognitive rather than emotional relationships. Psychological research on planning emphasizes the cognitive over the emotional, while social psychological research studies the effects of cognitive emotional interaction on planning judgment. This article argues that planning analysts might combine cognitive and emotional ideas about planning using research insights from the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and the conceptual insights from the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Two brief planning episodes illustrate the relevance of such integration for studying and understanding the kind of planning judgments practitioners make in their everyday practice.

Keywords:

• Emotions
• planning judgment
• planning practice
• pragmatic planning
• cognitive planning

Notes

1. Note that the assumptions associated with cognition among social psychologists is less demanding than among those psychologists studying cognitive psychology of planning.

2. See the work by Pollock (2004) who writes as a heretic among those studying normative decision theory using models of optimality. Instead of embracing Simon's (1982) satsificing strategy, he embraces planning. We make plans in order to organize how we judge and choose among alternatives as we make decisions.

3. “First came the machinery for producing reactions to an object or event, directed at the object or at the circumstances—the machinery of emotion. Second came the machinery for producing a brain map and then a mental image, an idea, for the reactions and for the resulting state of the organism—a machinery of feeling … Eventually, in a fruitful combination with past memories, imagination, and reasoning, feelings led to the emergence of foresight and the possibility of creating novel, non stereotypical responses” (Damasio, 2003, p. 80).

4. F.G. Bailey (1983) argues that we manage our passions using a ‘colony of selves’, what I refer to as personae. Michael, in Bailey's terms shifts from a moral to a civic persona, from an attachment of solidarity to publicity.

5. Plato's Socrates recognized the threat by the Sophists in similar fashion. The dialectical method was designed to thwart the sort of direct emotional appeals made by orators indifferent to a truth based in cognitive judgment. Of course not all sophists were con artists or the sort of dupes that Plato sometimes creates in the Dialogues. My point is to emphasize that the pursuit of truth emerged in the dialectical exchange as an antagonism between the inherent distortions that emotions allow and the purity of ideas unencumbered by such corporal limitations.