3.2.1 Systems Engineering Decision Making May Be More Emotional Than Rational!

Many subscribe to the hypothesis or generally accepted premise that professionals, e.g., systems engineers, make work‐related decisions rationally, considering all the facts, while being objective, impersonal, and unemotional. A contrarian view would be that many, if not most, of our professional decisions are based primarily on emotion rather than reason, i.e., gut instincts about what would be best considering our own self‐interests. The results of a simple survey are presented and discussed in an attempt to shed light on this issue. Despite the author's hypothesis and the thrust of the paper's title, the conclusion (based upon the five dozen responses received) is that most work‐related decisions are indeed made rationally but many are made more emotionally than otherwise might be surmised.