6 December, 2011: Food for Thought lunch

• Dr. Trui Steen: Double Bind: How professionals cope with contrasting demands
• Dr. Wilco van Dijk: 'About Dirty Harry and a Guilty Conscience'
• Practical details

The Dean of the Graduate School of Social and Behavioural Sciences wishes to invite you to a Food for Thought lunch themed 'Emotions and decisions'.

Dr. Trui Steen: Double Bind: How professionals cope with contrasting demands

Trui Steen, associate professor at the Institute of Public Administration, will present the recently started VIDI-research ‘Double Bind: How professionals cope with contrasting demands'. This research concerns how public service professionals align their public service motivation, a personal commitment to the public interest, with contrasting demands from organizational and social contexts.

Although public service motivation is a hot topic in public administration research, little is known about how public service motivation is actually put into practice. We study the interfered impact of public service motivation and professionalism on decision-making in a context of conflicting values and demands.

The empirical study focuses on veterinarian-inspectors working in food safety services. This provides a unique setting. Inspectors work in a demanding environment involving both face-to-face interaction and social and political attention for their work. Demands set by the organizational goal to preserve food safety may contrast with inspectors’ professional ethos, cultural values, the extra-organizational focus implied in their public service motivation, or the need to address public opinion. Next to theoretical advances based on empirical research, this project aims at offering practitioners insight into the potential gains and risks involved in promoting public service motivation.

Dr. Wilco van Dijk: 'About Dirty Harry and a Guilty Conscience'

Emotions are an important aspect of our lives. But how do they influence our decisions? This question will be the topic of this talk. Based on appraisal theories of emotions, I will argue that different discrete emotions (e.g., sadness, fear, anger, guilt and shame) have differential effects on our decisions. Using recent empirical research findings, including our own, I will demonstrate that emotions affect our decisions in critical (and sometimes unappreciated) ways. Although the impact of emotions on our decisions might seem irrational, at least they are predictably irrational.

Wilco van Dijk is Associate Professor at the Leiden University Institute of Psychology.

Practical details