In forecasting happiness I overviewed some of Daniel Kahneman's research into affective forecasting. This month's Strategy+Business has a nice interview with him sharing more of his thoughts.

Here are some highlights, with all the credit going to MIT interviewer Michael Schrage and to HBS student Matt Mahoney: (I highly recommend reading the whole article, free subscription).

-You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it’s functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary. There might be some environment in which it’s dysfunctional, but mainly it’s inevitable.

-They’re not trying to learn from their own mistakes; they’re not investing the smallest amount in trying to actually figure out what they’ve done wrong. And that’s not an accident: They don’t want to know.

-But, you know, there’s also the issue of perception, which links to intuition. Perception evolved differently than either intuition or cognition evolved.

Matt's final comment is great, "This hits on so many themes from my cognitive science days at UCLA, plus, more crucially, every single class I'm taking (finance, reporting & control, lead, technology operations mgmt.)

His question for me is: "If emotions get in the way (b/c it overweights), how can we use emotion as a tool to build intuition? to blend intuition and reasoning?" Matt, here is one idea (see Finance with Feelings).

As far as it's implications for marketing (see Neuromarketing to Your Mind).