9.1: The Pervasiveness of Emotions

Good thinking involves reasoning, not rationalization. It is based on what we have good reasons to think is true, not on what we would like to be true. This shouldn’t lead us to abandon emotions when we are thinking about things—we couldn’t do so even if we tried. Emotions are a very central and important part of being human, and we are not like Mr. Spock on Star Trek, who is largely unaffected by feelings, nor would we want to be. Furthermore, emotions play a central role in motivating our actions. If we love someone, that will lead us to treat them in certain ways; if we hate them, we will treat them quite differently. If we lacked emotions, we wouldn’t be motivated to do much of anything.

Emotions are a very mixed bag; they include joy, love, compassion, sympathy, pride, grief, sorrow, anger, fear, jealousy, envy and hatred. Although it is sometimes useful to speak as though emotions were one thing and thought was another, there really isn’t a very clear line between the two. Emotions are not simply non-rational states that just happen to us. They can be more or less rational, more or less supported by the evidence, and they are susceptible to rational evaluation. It makes sense, for example, to be angry in some situations but not in others. If I have evidence that Wilbur has punched Sam simply because he likes to hurt people, it makes sense to be angry with Wilbur. But if I’m angry with Wilbur just because I don’t like his looks, anger doesn’t make sense. In some cases, jealousy has a basis in fact—a person really has taken up with someone else; in other cases, someone dreams things up simply because they are insecure. Jealousy may not be a good emotion in either case, but it makes more sense in the first case than it does in the second.

It is entirely reasonable to let our emotions and needs play a role in our plans and decisions; the fact that you love your child or take pride in your work gives you an excellent reason to take care of your little Wilbur and to do your job well. The fact that you are afraid of lung cancer gives you a good reason to stop smoking. The pity you feel for starving children is a good reason to donate money to charities that give them food. Indeed, without emotions you probably wouldn’t care enough about anything to bother taking an action. But it’s important to guard against the intrusion of emotions into places where they don’t belong.

Emotions and Information

Emotions can affect all the other factors that we examined earlier in this module.

Perception

Our moods influence how attentive we are to our environment. People who are elated or depressed are often preoccupied with how they feel, and they focus less on what’s happening around them. Emotions also affect our perceptual set, and so they color how we perceive things. For example, the people who watched the Princeton and Dartmouth football game probably saw it differently because of how they felt about their team. They identified with their university and its team, and most people tend to see the groups they identify with as good.

If you find yourself home alone at night after watching a scary movie, shadows and sounds in the backyard or attic can assume new and sinister forms. Your fear and anxiety lead you to perceive familiar surroundings different than the way you ordinarily do. Or if you have become jealous, a harmless and friendly conversation between your significant other and a friend may look like flirting.

Testimony

If we like someone, we may give too much weight to their testimony, and if we don’t like them, we may give it too little weight. We are likely to give the testimony of someone we have come to trust in one area extra weight in other areas as well, even if there is no reason to suppose they would be particularly reliable in that area. If we feel especially threatened or frightened by the world around us, it may even be tempting to give too much weight to the claims of demagogues or others who see conspiracies everywhere they turn. We want an easy answer to our problems, and that’s just what they offer.

Memory

As we have already addressed in a previous chapter, we are constantly elaborating on the information we’ve stored in our memories. As we saw, our emotions and moods can affect the ways we fill in details. For example, our memories are sometimes selective and distorted in ways that protect our own selfimage or self-esteem; we sometimes remember things the way we would like for them to have been, rather than the way that they actually were.

Fallacies and Biases

In the next chapter, we will study several fallacies, which are ways in which reasoning can go wrong. Our emotions often give rise to fallacious reasoning. In still later chapters, we will see how emotions often lead to various self-serving biases in our thinking.