Published in the research literature as Emotion-Based Decision-Making.
How much do your feelings shape your decisions?
How much weight your feelings carry when you're deciding something that matters.
Emotion-Based Decision-Making is about how much say a feeling gets when something matters. Not whether somebody has one, but whether it counts as evidence.
Everybody uses both. The scale is about which one arrives first and which one gets the final word, on the decisions where the two disagree and something real is at stake.
The disagreement usually looks like this: the spreadsheet says one thing and something in the person says another. One end reaches for the reason the spreadsheet might be wrong. The other reaches for the reason the feeling might be.
Neither of those is the mature answer, though almost every piece of writing about this insists one of them is. A feeling is compressed evidence from a great deal of experience, which is why it is often right and why it is impossible to audit. Reasoning is auditable and can be confidently wrong all the way to the end.
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Start your free assessmentEvery one of the seven runs between two named ends, and neither end is the one to aim for. Each buys something and each costs something, which is why both of them have a name here.
The reasoning has to hold. Somebody at this end wants a decision they can explain, and will set a strong feeling aside if they cannot say what it is evidence of. What it buys is decisions that survive being questioned, and a resistance to being talked into things. What it costs is the occasional decision that was correct on paper and wrong in every other way, made while something in them was objecting.
The feeling gets a vote and often the casting one. Somebody at this end takes a strong reaction as information about the situation rather than as noise to be managed. What it buys is speed, and picking up things no analysis had a column for. What it costs is that a feeling carries no receipt: there is no way to check it, and it is just as confident when it is picking up a bad night's sleep.
The middle usually means the two are consulted in turn. The reasoning gets done and then checked against whether the answer sits right, and a decision that passes both is the one that gets made. Where they disagree, the tiebreak tends to depend on the kind of decision it is.
A result names one of five positions along this scale. They run from one end to the other, and no figure sits beside them: there is no reference sample for these scales, so nothing here can say how many people land where.
The common misreading is that one end is rational and the other is not. Both are ways of processing information about a situation, and both are wrong on a regular basis. The difference is which kind of mistake somebody is set up to make.
Both are about a person's own feelings. Attending to Emotions is about whether they notice one; Emotion-Based Decision-Making is about what happens to it afterwards.
Both can look like being led by feeling. Responsive Distress is about how strongly somebody else's pain lands; Emotion-Based Decision-Making is about how much any feeling steers a choice.
A scale describes a tendency, not an ability. There is no good end of any of the seven, and where somebody sits says nothing about how well they handle what they feel.
It also says nothing about where they stand next to anybody. No reference sample exists for these scales, so a result describes how one person answered and stops there.
Or start with what emotional intelligence means.
Sixty-eight questions, about eight minutes. You get a plain read on all seven scales, free, with both ends of every one of them named rather than scored.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
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