How emotion can guide us to rational behavior
- Sat, April 23 2011
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
Just about every field of science shows emotion trumps reason in human decision-making. If we want people to take action, we have to speak to the emotional mind or we’re unlikely to get far.
David Brooks has a new book out called the Social Animal which points to the same reality: Showing emotion is the foundation for reason in guiding behavior. This is an interesting nuance: We need emotion in order to arrive at reasonable decision-making, he says. (Side note: One of my all-time favorite books is the psychology classic The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson. It’s a must-read if you’re in the business of persuasion. I’m not quite sure how Brooks was able to use the same title.)
At a recent Public Agenda event, Brooks noted:
“What emotion does is it assigns value to things, it tells you what you want. When you look at something, you react to it, with a desire for it or an aversion to it, with an admiration for it or contempt to it. If you don’t have that emotional repertoire, then you can’t make rational decisions,” said Brooks.
According to Public Agenda’s account of the event:
Brooks came to explore the interplay of emotion and behavior after observing and covering the failure of numerous rational policy models throughout the course of his career. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Brooks notes, teams of economists were sent in with privatization and hard currency plans. Yet the economic efforts struggled because we misunderstood the cultural context of a nation that had lived under suspicion and dictatorship for decades. “We assumed their fundamental problems were all economic,” Brooks said. “But the fundamental problem was the lack of social trust.” More recently, we have seen policy failures in Iraq, where the United States was oblivious to the psychological effects of the Hussein regime on the Iraqi people, and during the financial crisis, when we trusted financiers to make rational decisions under stress and underestimated what Brooks calls “emotional contagions” that swept through the profession, leading bankers to fail to identify risk.
At the event, Brooks said our current budget debate shows we lack the emotional, “visceral horror” we once had against exacting a cost on future generations. To regain a sense of common citizenship, we have to first educate our emotions.
Great food for thought for all of us: Reason starts with emotion. How can we better forge the emotional connections that lead to wise policies and social good?
Comments
I’m so glad that you highlighted the work of David Brooks. I recently had the opportunity to hear him speak about social-emotional motivations. David’s perspective was point-on! Very impressed… So thanks for sharing this resource with your readers!