Feeling, then reason
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
"Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions." — David Hume
When I started writing about decision-making 163 blogs ago, I started from the perspective that we reach our views through a mostly “rational” process. We gather evidence then weigh it, apply challenge to it, and only then conclude. Emotions were a fly in the ointment that we should acknowledge and weigh. I no longer believe it is done that way, or for most decisions, especially for contentious, high stakes topics.
The emotional side of debates
Views on things seem to cluster e.g. if I know your view on energy policy, I probably have a good sense on your view on taxes. These clusters happen because we belong to a group and the group tends to develop a bias towards one solution or another. When we surround ourselves with people that have a certain view, it influences us: 1) it creates an information flow that favours the default view for the group and 2) it feels uncomfortable to hold a view different from your community.
Whether consciously or sub-consciously our brain normally concludes it is better (and psychologically safer) in a polarised environment to hold views that help avoid these more fundamental questions. It leads people to hold “convenient” views i.e. inherited views that are more easily accepted than truly thought through.
Today, we see this on important debates: economics, immigration, welfare, the debt load, demographics, climate etc. Most time is spent defending one view rather than doing the work to find something that brings us forward.
Post-rationalisation
The bit I have changed my mind most on is the role of emotion in the decision-making. Evidence is increasingly pointing to us feeling first. Emotionally we determine the conclusion we wish to arrive at before our analytical brain steps in. Afterwards either consciously or sub-consciously we select evidence, weightings and apply challenge in a way that arrives at our intended conclusion.
We do not need to have financial incentives (eg sales bonuses) to help us reason wishfully. There are also instances we will do this where we may deviate from our group or feel a sense of dissatisfaction with an outcome that may be technically right but not good for us.
Wishful reasoning is not just present online. The legal system and parliament is set up for people to present one-sided cases and in finance there are many instances of reverse-engineered spreadsheets to help justify a particular outcome.
The idea that we feel first then think is an uncomfortable thing to discuss, particularly for those of us who take pride in being rational. Jonathan Haidt has written a superb book about this.
The rider and the elephant
Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind (link below) offers a useful analogy for this. Imagine the mind as a rider sitting atop an elephant. The elephant is everything subconscious: instinct, intuition, emotion, experience and identity. The rider is our conscious reasoning. From the outside it looks like the rider is steering, but this is not true. The rider manages and serves the elephant. The elephant’s chosen direction comes first; the rider adapts to this. If the elephant leans, the rider's task is to explain, after the event, why the lean was justified.
Intelligence does not save us from this
The natural assumption is that being intelligent is a defence against post-rationalisation. I’m now convinced the opposite is true. We see motivated reasoning in finance, politics and many other spheres which require practitioners to have high conventional measures of intelligence.
The research that Haidt draws upon indicates that the higher IQ the better we are at finding arguments for things we feel, as opposed to directing that intelligence necessarily to finding the truth. Smart people can be aggressive advocates rather than truth seekers.
When we hear about the raised emotion in politics, we intuitively understand that this is a bad sign. It is likely to bring about wishful reasoning rather than creating an environment for progress.
Brexit revisited
When faced with difficult questions like trade agreements, migration rules and regulatory alignment we often boil it down to a simpler question. Simpler questions are more easily felt than calculated. Brexit simplified down to something like “are we European”? For 48% it was being a member of a club of Western nations and for 52% it was about British sovereignty, control and limits to arrivals.
The simpler question can be more easily felt than reasoned. Once we have concluded whether we feel European or not our arguments to justify our reasoning will arrive in a predictable fashion.
Ten years of evidence has only marginally moved the population in polls to a narrow advantage for rejoining the European Union.
Today’s emotional questions
Pulling the thread of the rider and the elephant and our major debates we can start to think about the feeling each side has.
Debate | Instinct for | Instinct against |
Energy transition to renewables | Care for future generations; protect our environment. | Dictatorial, driven by elites who live energy-intensive lives. Raising prices for the poor who spend highest income proportion on utilities. |
Immigration | Openness, best and brightest, import labour gaps. | Only if a necessity, impact on culture and belonging. Law and order. |
Welfare | Social safety net. Sign of looking after poorest members. | Incentive for laziness and not contributing. |
Reducing Debt Loads | Cost control to avoid children being saddled with large debts. | Avoiding suffering here and now. Low taxes allow people to keep the rewards of their work. Austerity hurts poor people. |
Encouraging fertility | Treat family planning as a personal domain. | Societal problem. Who carries the workload and culture in the future? |
Avoiding the rabbit hole
Whilst we cannot remove feelings, we can try and acknowledge them and appeal to each other's higher selves. The media environment is increasingly incentivised towards targeting the elephant. Dramatic, visual framing we see in social media and in journalism is engaging but poor for decision-making. Content like memes and short videos reaches the elephant directly. Entertainment skips the rider altogether. Often innocent looking jokes have a weighty presuppositions.
In reality, balanced argument is not exciting which encourages arguments from each side to be optimised towards more elephant-directed language. That leaves us marinating in a stream of material engineered to make our feelings stronger, leaving a more agitated elephant. This increases the gap and decreases the common ground between the tribes.
So what do we do about it?
I am wary of neat solutions to this, but the stakes are so high.
1) Humility about ourselves: we all have an elephant and capable of becoming attached to a conclusion before examining it. "Why might I want this to be true?"
2) Understand each others feeling about the subject: Disagreement generally starts with instincts rather than facts. If we only engage with another person's argument, we often miss what is underlying it.
3) Seek to solve: Find areas of commonality rather than only areas of disagreement, only then will solutions emerge. This will involve going deeper into each others arguments.
None of this removes disagreement, nor should it. A healthy society depends on people arriving at different conclusions and then working out how to use each others insights. Good disagreement should be celebrated. Rather than today's punch and judy show, it is openly bringing our facts, arguments and emotions to the discussion.
So what?
We like to think decisions are made rationally, but they usually aren't. Many of our views come in clusters because of our identity and group membership.
Holding group-approved "convenient" views is psychologically safe. Topics such as immigration, climate, welfare, debt and demographics are often argued rationally but driven emotionally.
Post-rationalisation is pervasive. We too often start with a desired conclusion and then selectively use evidence, challenge and weighting to support it. This is well illustrated by Jonathan Haidt's "rider and elephant" analogy. Importantly, intelligence is not a safeguard against bias. Intelligent people are often better at constructing convincing arguments for what they already believe.
Modern media amplifies emotional thinking. Social media, memes, short videos and dramatic journalism are designed to go directly to the "elephant", strengthening instincts and increasing polarisation.
The best response is to disagree better. If we understand that rational arguments alone do not drive what people really think about something, we need to connect at a deeper level. That empathy begins by being open and curious.
Next week, will be "Citizen’s assemblies". As always get the blog delivered directly to your inbox on Home | Deciders | for mental fitness | change your mind.
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