To an American population that values social status more than the establishment of relationships, it’s important to know exactly why this is the case, and why the material strive to gain followers and invoke a positive emotion is more important in some cases than garnering actual tangible relationships. Along with that, it should be noted that persuasive statements that garner an emotional response from an audience are proven to be more effective than statements that rely on factual evidence.

So why is this? Is it just how the human brain responds to persuasion? Or is it a response molded from the way our society works? According to Michael Levine of Psychology Today, in his story “The Divided Mind,” delves into how emotion and logic work together to make decisions, but also how at times rule over one another. Specifically, Levine cites the multitude of decisions that humans make every day. Decisions such as what to wear, what groceries to buy and who to interact with.

Levine talks about how the logically inclined left side of the brain wrestles with the more emotionally driven right side to decide how to act when presented with options to act upon. He says that roughly eighty percent of the decisions americans make are driven solely by emotion, leaving the other twenty percent to reason. Broadly, this is evidence that emotion is more highly valued than logic, but it makes more sense that they would share the responsibility, right?

The actual decisions people make are ruled by emotion, with logic filling in the gaps, as well as a sort of persuasive soliloquy that someone may give themselves. Logic also helps to persuade others, maybe in passing conversation or perhaps just to convince others.

It would seem that the two are not exclusive to each other, instead of one ruling over the other completely, they influence how the brain makes decisions, with emotion more effectively making decisions and logic more effectively explaining them. Persuasion is evidently more about effectively engaging an audience through emotional response, why is this?

According to Michael Kalikow & Katherine Monson in their article titled “Why Emotional Intelligence Matters in Negotiation”, they write about why it’s necessary to have such a skill, what it does for negotiators. The article cites how cognitive and emotional empathy both help to affect the outcome of whatever negotiations are made. Specifically, the difference between the two and how they react, with cognitive being more about empathy, and understanding someone worldly stature, and emotional empathy being more about understanding the other’s feelings about their (and conversely your) opinions.

Both of these matter in negotiation, applying an argument your contending negotiator can easily punch holes through with their rebuttal is undoubtedly less effective than concocting a rigid and bristling argument. This is where logistical analysis and the the “intelligence” part of “Emotional Intelligence” come in.

All of this together adds up really to mean that while emotion makes decisions more than logic, both have a role to play in the actual follow through of those decisions. In other words, nobody would be able to make effective decisions without first deciding on what decision to make, as well as providing an internal soliloquy for those decisions to make more sense.