Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review suggests that to Get What You Want, Don’t Go With Your Gut.  Rather than let your emotions produce a reaction to an event that affects the outcome, you should pause and let your assessment of the preferred outcome guide the reaction.  Solid, Jedi Master stuff.  However, the more I read about moral psychology, the more I question this premise.  Joanthan Haidt at Virgina has done some interesting experiments asking students their moral evaluations of these scenarios in which no harm comes to subjects:

a son who promises his mother, while she was on her deathbed, that he would visit her grave every week, and then reneged on his commitment because he was busy.

a man buys a dead chicken at the supermarket and then has “relations” with it before cooking and eating it.

Most of the students responded with an strong “ewww” factor guiding their evaluations, but had difficulty coming up with rational explanations for why the behavior was morally wrong. The logic for its moral appropriateness, or inappropriateness, resided in “the gut” or the emotional brain. I wonder if better advice to those in the business world and, from my perspective, the political world would be to become skillful and knowing when to listen to your gut and when to listen to the rational brain that sets goals. It would seem that there are times when your gut is telling you that your outcomes need to change. Personally, I’d be ecstatic if more politicians listened to their gut when voting on legislation.