ABSTRACT
Is a decision the product of cold cognitive processes?1 Looking at the major theories in decision making, such as Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), subjective expected utility theory (Savage, 1954) or reinforcement learning (e.g., Sutton & Barto, 1998; Fu & Anderson, 2006), one would imagine the human mind filled with equations and flowcharts. In contrast, the intuition of most people about the human mind is that its main forces constitute emotions and affects which are more difficult to quantify (Ubel & Loewenstein, 1997), and that decisions are to a large extent the product of intuition rather than of cold calculation. Yet the fact of the matter is that science proceeds by way of quantification, and so emotional and intuitive processes, which are almost by definition not part of cold calculating cognition (cf. Böhm & Brun, 2008), are difficult to study in a scientific manner. In the present chapter we address the challenge of studying emotional and intuitive aspects of decision making using quantifiable physiological measures, which offer the possibility to add emotional and intuitive elements into mainstream formal models of decision making.
