Emotions like anxiety, frustration and even excitement can influence the selection of data sets.
This piece argues that using emotion-driven data is perilous as it allows personal biases to interfere with data selection and skews the results. Researchers often struggle when they are deciding how they should represent the data due to their emotional biases.
A study by Harvard Business Review found that anxiety reduces the ability to discern between good and bad advice. Anxiety further influences humans to rely on lousy advice or on advice that poses a conflict of interest.
Instead of revealing only one-sided story that looks beneficial from the business-perspective, marketers should include all data points to tell the “real” story. The author contends “good data does that all on its own (whether we like it or not).”
[4 minute read]