Millions of people have either been directly told or have somehow gotten the message that dispassionate, rational thinking without any pesky emotions attached to it is the best way to think. In other words they were taught: a coolly rational, emotion free approach to information is important to good judgement.
Yeah, and I was told “Christopher Columbus discovered America.” Sorry sweetie, we were both badly misinformed.
Just as it IS TRUE Christopher Columbus was significant -for some reasons- , it is also true that incorporating -badly understood and badly regulated emotional information into decision making… isn’t good.
I mean that’s obvious: people who don’t have a full range of abilities around emotions, tend to make decisions that harm others. Read that again as often as necessary, until you understand how important it is. Like people who are so un-self aware they think using AI to conduct warfare is a good idea. I digress, but only a little.
This article is a quick-ish summary of why having well developed emotional awareness and decoding skills are extremely useful (and I’d argue: quite necessary) to being ABLE to use good judgement in decision making, and in spotting BS others are spewing. In fact, it appears they are what make for the easiest and fastest routes to good judgement.
How? Let’s back up.
First, I want to state two of my primary assumptions (and maybe yours, too): Using good judgement is really important. And it (being able to consistently use good judgement) SHOULD BE why people end up in decision making positions (aka positions of power)
Okay, if we are on the same page about the need for good judgement in decision making, then let’s proceed.
The Importance of Valence
Well developed- skills around emotional sensitivity help immensely with “good judgement” because of a thing called valence.
And ALL emotional signals have valence.
In the psychological sense of the word, valence can be defined as having a sense of whether something is “good” or “bad.”
You see a flat tire on your car and you get an emotional reaction that boils down to some kind of “bad” feeling. A friend surprises you with something you like: Your reaction boils down to some variation on “this feels good” Sounds simple, and it can seem trivial. It’s not; bear with me.
Using those signals skillfully regularly gives us -big- clues about situations.
Imagine you now need new car tires and so you (somehow) get three printed estimates (real old school like). You might notice different paper types and logos, sure, but mainly you’re looking for things like the quality of the tires, the price, and the trustworthiness of the folks doing the work. And so you use the estimates (and your emotion based memories of how it felt getting them) in order to try to figure out the most important information and make the best decision for yourself.
Say there’s a line item in one: $100 to fill tires with air. Your FIRST reaction will be some gut/body (emotion based) thing. This happens just a little before you -translate- that reaction into words like “what a rip off!” That body/gut reaction to seeing that line item…is full of a valence indicating “this is bad.” (I mean, I hope whatever future you live in: $100 to fill your new tires with air is considered a total rip off).
Okay, now try an experiment: really deconstruct in your mind or on paper -how you KNOW- charging $100 to put air in your tires is “way too high”
Putting that whole “knowing” into a rational language based argument is -crazily- inefficient: Some part of you just KNOWS “that’s a rip off”
Sure, you CAN stop to explain -why- , but to FULLY do that using rational arguments would likely take paragraphs of dispassionately putting words together, and maybe even involve using phrases like “value proposition”. Blech.
IOW: using dispassionate logic can work, but it’s long and tedious.
AND here’s the thing: pretty much all people (yes, all people, like you and me) can and do get lost and sidetracked about -what to prioritize- and stay focused on when they are walking themselves through that dispassionate rational thought process. That’s not always a bad thing….AND/BUT
That means bad faith actors can (and do) distract people from important issues by keeping their focus on less important ones or even trivial things (look over there-squirrel!). And we are so surrounded by it, that at this point in time, I can almost hear some total huckster using a bunch of big words and a winning smile to try to argue that $100.00 is ack-shully reasonable considering the overall complexity of air compressors, the future benefits to the consumer of having the vehicle’s tires filled with air, and the risks the entrepreneur had to take on to even run a business (or some such bs) .
I mean, the above example is overblown (a bit), but this -is- how normal and intelligent people can be persuaded to go along with stupid stuff: by simply being misdirected or redirected.
If you somehow don’t have (or value) well developed emotional awareness, you simply won’t have an internal sense telling you “No, don’t listen to -these- rationalizations. Keep your focus on this ridiculous line item, this jerk really wants 100 bucks for something that costs him almost nothing!” So you drift along and suddenly 100bucks sound reasonable the way the silver tongued devil just explained it.
IOW: that -emotional bit of info- (that valence) is what most loudly says “this is BS” And that is what creates an -internally- based sense of judgement about the situation.
Lousy “Ethics” Or Decision Making Without Valence
Without recognizing and being able to understand your own valence filled reactions consistently and ACCURATELY, you are more susceptible to just going along and believing whatever a person says..
Accuracy is a pretty important ingredient…because if you’re NOT skilled in really understanding your own internal life, emotional valence can also be evoked and manipulated by similar kinds of redirection…in ways that are usually based on fears and suspicions. Unfortunately, fear mongering is often quite effective on the least emotionally aware people. This is pretty well known. It is super unfortunate and sounds condescending but really: “Can’t let them commie freeloaders git away with wastin’ tax dollars, now can we?” is the level some folks can be convinced to remain at. All because they don’t have much internal awareness to think for themselves that being a mean jerk to others isn’t a great way to strengthen any community or its members.
Other real life consequences? Oh, there are lots of them. They run the gamut from the personal to the political.
But let’s use a situation with widespread consequences for effect. And let’s go back to a -slightly- less chaotic time, where the pretty damned obvious corruption was still -somehow- a bit more hidden from view to some folks. Let’s consider decision making and the use of military “ethics” in Bush’s assault on Iraq.
Military brass (trained in war making and cold logic) were busy trying to check off ethics boxes “rationally and dispassionately” to decide if bombing a country was warranted based on how reliable their “intelligence”was. If you were old enough and paid attention to this period of time, you might recall this was reported on with great gravity by the corporate press.
Meanwhile, countless millions of normal humans in touch with their emotions, got strong senses of “bad” valence from their basic senses of humanity….and were yelling (at their tvs and in the streets) some variation on: “JFC, you will harm civilians and kids, as well as soldiers, what the hell is wrong with you?”
So the normies were activated by and stayed PRIORITIZED on the emotional factors in play: The compassion (and the idea of bombing people as a lack of compassion) was the priority, instead of whether or not some bit of intelligence was “accurate enough to warrant action.”
And here again I want to emphasize that a big part of being competently in touch with emotional issues is to be able to -sort through- what were still very complex issues of grief, anger and betrayal at the attack and loss of US life on 9.11 and still hold compassion for others. Starting from a strong (internal) sense of compassion for others instead of just blindly accepting there might be weapons of mass destruction -allowed- people to more easily see the (many) holes in the stories the pro war folks were telling.
And even had there been some intelligence that was accurate-who still would have been correct in the end ?All without ever even having to get distracted by or wade through those tedious check off boxes?
Honestly, it can be that stark of a difference -a lot- of the time. Entire -stupid- systems are built on rationalizations that leave out hugely important human(e) (emotion based) factors. Gross exploitation of labor, anyone? Nuclear waste that needs to be managed for thousands of years is PURPOSEFULLY ignored when the topic of nuclear energy comes up, so nuclear energy apologists can lie and act as if it is somehow a clean energy? Yeah. The amount of faulty logic can be mind-blowingly obvious, and very quickly recognizable to you …if you can sense the valence based reactions -and- test them against logic. Don’t get me wrong: Valence doesn’t work by itself.
Valence is an important ingredient. Just as dry rice grains by themselves aren’t a good food until you add water, heat, and cook the mixture, valence by itself won’t suffice You have to weigh the sense of valence you get against logical issues to see if the “hunches” keep being useful. Newsflash: you can get strong and very wrong senses of “bad” valence whenever you encounter something that produces cognitive dissonance in you. So it’s not a cure-all. AND/BUT with skill and familiarity, this kind of misguided valence becomes easier to spot, just like chord changes become much (much) easier when you PRACTICE playing the guitar. But without being informed by -any- senses of valence (because you don’t recobnize them or are activvely trying to suppress them), you’re very liable to get lost in trying to determine what may -seem- necessary to prioritize, and miss what -is- virtually always the most important of issues Treating others with respect and compassion. And to me: in cultures built on colonization, that’s always a dangerous path to do down.
Why Has Your Own Emotional World Been UnderValued?
So… It also appears necessary that people somehow have to lose their abilities to see the humanity in others in order to treat them badly. This is not news, of course.
But it is worth thinking about. Consider how much and why so many people using (authoritarian forms of) power OVER others will openly ignore, downplay, or often even denigrate the skillful use of emotion based information, while ALSO manipulating the hell out of what they do use. And clearly, entire swaths of the population CAN be persuaded to NOT think of emotional information as important, nor are they skilled in using it, even when it would greatly benefit everyone to do so.
My main point for this article is this: purposefully downplaying the importance of emotion based information in decision making is a TERRIBLE practice, and, in fact, is a huge part of how bad decisions happen in the first place.
By the way, I chose -that- 25 year old disastrous set of military decisions because it was at least -a little- plausible then that some of the decision makers back in Bush’s day -may- still have been trying to use “dispassionate reasoning” in good faith.
I choose to NOT use anything the completely unfit and profoundly emotionally -stunted- people are doing under the current US occupation/regime.
Because I think -that- would have obscured the point that (truly) generations of intelligent folks did fall for the idea that believing “only cold un emotional rational thinking” is appropriate for decision making.
And, for what it’s worth: I’m sorry if you were taught that emotions have no place in decision making.