Decision-Making by Aesthetic Capacity; Human-Human Communication and Human-AI Communication in the Working World of Today and Tomorrow

This paper starts from the observation that in practice business leaders in their decision-making processes use their affective capacity, their felt knowledge or gut feeling, in combination with their cognitive capacity, their thought knowledge.For this observation in detail, a series of business people have been interviewed within several different working settings.The interviews show that this combination adds value to their business.It is concluded that felt and thought knowledge can be practically checked by each other if done systematically in order to contribute effectively to a truthful decision-making process.It is therefore potentially suitable and important for the development of this human capacity to improve decision-making processes and to support employees in a management development environment.Subsequently, these observations are operationalized as Aesthetic Capacity: it is this human capacity that allows to consciously connect cognitive information with affective information by and within any Human-Human communication.More specifically, the objectivative communicative approach by Habermas and the relational communicative approach of Watzlawick are combined in this Aesthetic Capacity.In one further step of this paper, however, there is the new and fundamentally different kind of communication being considered: Human-AI Communication.Here, it is already today becoming visible across society and across nations how humans tend to trust such human-AI communication even more than human-human communication.This paper uses a cross-science approach to explore effective empowerment of the individual in a society dominated by non-rational and/or unverifiable information.This would allow individuals to better utilize the power of non-rational affective information, while also dismantling seductive digital undermining tactics.Therefore, the paper is looking into how the concept of Aesthetic Capacity as discussed so far, may be transferred onto and applied to such technology-shaped communication.