Decision making is usually not a step-by-step verbal argument or a mathematical calculation, but
rather a mental parallel process of inference to the best plan. This process involves assessment of
competing actions to determine which combination of them best accomplishes a person's goals. Goals
are emotionally valued mental representations of imagined states of the world and self. The brain
performs such representations by patterns of firing in neural populations in multiple brain areas,
including ones that encode verbal and sensory information. Emotional value is part of the
representation of goals and actions by virtue of coordination with brain areas such as the nucleus
accumbens and the amygdala, which encode positive and negative aspects of the world. The overall
assessment of the coherence of actions and goals is the result of parallel constraint satisfaction
carried out by firing of neurons in all the relevant populations based on the synaptic connections
among them. You don't tell your brain what to do, and your brain doesn't tell you what to do: you are
your brain deciding what to do in your physical and social environment.
Because of the centrality of goals to decision making, a major part of rationality is the adoption,
abandonment, and revaluing of goals. We adopt new goals because of biological needs and because
they are subsidiary to goals we already have, but also through emotional social processes such as
having people who care for us, role models, and people we care about. When we recognize that
achievement of a goal is not possible or that situations have changed to make it no longer subsidiary
to a higher goal, then it is rational to abandon the goal. The process of decision making, in which
parallel constraint satisfaction is used to assess the coherence of actions and goals, can lead to the
downgrading of the importance of some goals. Wisdom—knowing what matters—requires the
adaptive capability of acquiring, abandoning, and revaluing goals.
The inherently emotional nature of decision making has important implications for many areas of
human activity, including politics. The psychologist Drew Westen pointed out in 2007 the repeated
failures of American political strategists who tried to approach voters through dispassionate, issueoriented
campaigns. He says that voters' decisions are based on answers to four questions. How do I
feel about the candidate's party and its principles? How does this candidate make me feel? How do I
feel about this candidate's personal characteristics, particularly his or her integrity, leadership, and
compassion? How do I feel about this candidate's stands on issues that matter to me? Westen does not
infer from the substantial evidence about the impact of emotions on voting the view that the
Democratic Party he supports should ruthlessly exploit people's hopes and fears. Rather, he urges the
party to select leaders who have the wisdom, integrity, and emotional appeal to convince voters to
accept them based on their values and the best available evidence. The triumphant 2008 U.S.
presidential campaign of Barack Obama showed the power of combining strong arguments with
emotional magnetism.
The psychological and neural complexities of decision making allow many ways in which people
can make bad decisions, such as neglecting relevant goals, alternative actions, and relations among
them. Decision making is ineliminably emotional, with its input valuations of relevant
representations, accompanying feelings such as excitement or anxiety, and outputs such as satisfaction
or disappointment. Understanding decisions as brain processes has the distressing consequence that
the traditional dualistic idea of free will must be abandoned, but life can still be meaningful and
moral, as the next three chapters will show.