The study of emotions and decision making is now of considerable importance. This involves the application of various tools afforded by neuroscience. One important stream of the literature examines people with brain damage and how damage to particular parts of the brain known to be responsible for particular cognitive functions impacts on decision making. One example of this research is the work of Antonio Damasio, who finds that when the emotional part of the brain is damaged, this actually reduces the efficacy of decision making. Good decisions are a product of the emotional part of the brain working in conjunction with the deliberative part. This contradicts the assumptions of conventional economics, where emotions play a negative role in the decision‐making process. Here it is assumed that decision making can be modeled as being generated in a stoic, unemotional fashion, and that's why decisions tend to be optimal. But the evidence suggests that emotions actually play an important and, often, a positive role in decision making. The brain's emotional part working in relation with its deliberative part enhances the effectiveness of decision making, which counters the ideas about emotions in the decision‐making process of traditional economics.