Rationality and Affective Afflictions
That thinking is generally emotional is shown by many kinds of evidence, from psychological studies
concerning the general attachment of valuations to concepts, to neural studies of the interconnections
among cortical regions and emotional centers such as the amygdala. But my aim in this book is not
just to describe psychological phenomena but also to address normative, philosophical questions
concerning the meaning of life. So I have to ask: is it good or bad that thinking is emotional?
Emotions are widely thought to be bad for you. We saw this in Plato's metaphor of the charioteer
and the frequent opposition of “emotional” and “rational.” Many people believe that children and
women are emotional, but real men don't cry. Perhaps we should view emotions as annoying
intrusions into rational thinking, like hunger, thirst, and the need to go to the toilet. Then wise thinking
should aim to minimize the role of emotions, overcoming their irritating interference with proper
thinking based on logic. Although I want to reject such complete removal of emotions from rational
thought, I will review some of the ways in which emotions can indeed obstruct people's attempts to
develop wise pursuit of highly meaningful lives. There are at least five affective afflictions, ways our
emotions can seriously skew our thinking away from rationality: motivated inference, self-deception,
weakness of will, depression, and manic exuberance.
In chapter 2, I described how motivated inference can interfere with the objective evaluation of
evidence. Inferences are motivated when they are affected by our personal goals, as when people try
unverified medical treatments in the hope of improving their physical conditions. Such motivated
inferences are clearly emotional, because the belief that a treatment will work is based on the
valuation attached to the goal of getting better rather than on evidence of efficacy. Most of us are
prone to believe things that make us happy. Such inferences are not usually pure wishful thinking,
because people make them not by completely ignoring evidence, but rather by selectively considering
evidence that supports the view they want to hold. For example, if a friend tells you that the herbal
drug echinacea helped with a cold, then your emotional desire not to be sick may incline you to
elevate this small piece of evidence over large studies finding that the substance is ineffective.
Motivated inference can contribute to self-deception, which occurs when you form a belief even
though you have evidence against it. For example, you might think of yourself as a conscientious
person, even though you know that you often fail to meet your obligations. Some philosophers have
puzzled about how self-deception could be possible, since they assume that people have the ability to
rationally examine their full set of beliefs. But our thinking has no direct access to our huge numbers
of neural representations and processes, so it is not surprising that we can deceive ourselves by
making motivated inferences to some conclusions that available evidence should lead us to reject.
Motivated inference can contribute to bad decisions arising from conflicts of interest, as when a
medical expert gives distorted testimony in favor of the efficacy of a drug even though the expert
suspects the evidence for the drug is flawed.
An even more common affective affliction is weakness of will, which occurs when you find
yourself doing something that you know is not in your best interests. Familiar cases are eating
fattening foods, drinking too much alcohol, gambling more than you can afford, having inappropriate
sex, or lazily watching television instead of completing some overdue work. Such failings occur
frequently because of the strong emotional pull of activities such as eating, drinking, gambling, sex,
and avoiding chores. Even though our conscious thought may place a higher value on goals such as
health, morality, and productivity, the brain's emotional mechanisms may send us in a direction that
we would prefer not to pursue, all things considered.
Weakness of will is fostered by the operation of separate neural systems for immediate and
delayed rewards. The midbrain dopamine system is preferentially activated by decisions involving
immediately available rewards, whereas regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior
parietal cortex are engaged uniformly by long-and short-term choices. People are particularly prone
to make bad choices when they are tired, stressed, and presented with tempting sensory stimuli. The
prefrontal cortex says no, but the nucleus accumbens says yes, yes, yes!
Many people suffer occasionally or chronically from depression, a state of pervasive sadness in
which one finds it hard to see how anything can have any value at all. A depressed person may lose
the ability to find any enjoyment in previously pleasant activities and may slump into inactivity.
Depression can lead to bad decisions based on beliefs inconsistent with the evidence you already
possess—for example, that you have a history of successful and enjoyable pursuit of valuable goals.
Cognitive therapy is often effective by helping people to change their beliefs about the hopelessness
of their conditions. It can complement drug therapy that changes the brain by affecting levels of
neurotransmitters such as serotonin and increasing the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus.
At the other extreme, some people have bouts of mania, a state of great excitement in which
anything seems possible. In extreme cases, people suffering from the manic side of bipolar disorder
may take crazy risks such as wild driving or dangerous sex. A more moderate form of mania is
irrational exuberance, when people become so excited about a financial or romantic prospect that
they ignore cautions about perilous ventures. Financial bubbles such as the dot.com stock market
boom of the late 1990s and the American housing bubble of the 2000s are fueled by irrational
exuberance, when people become convinced that what goes up can only keep going up.
The negative effects of motivated inference, self-deception, weakness of will, conflicts of interest,
depression, and manic exuberance—and additional affective afflictions, including fears not based on
evidence—do indeed make it tempting to embrace the classical view that emotions just get in the way
of rational thinking. These affective afflictions make implausible the romantic view that our feelings
are inherently good and just need to be let loose. I certainly do not endorse the view “If it feels good,
believe it.”
But there are strong reasons why the classical path to wisdom based on relinquishing or
overcoming emotions is not feasible. First, you cannot simply turn off the emotional mechanisms that
link your neural processes of inference with processes of valuation that employ interconnections with
brain areas such as the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. You can no more decide to operate in a
fully nonemotional mode than you can decide to cut your left hemisphere off from your right
hemisphere without highly destructive neurosurgery.
Second, if you could give yourself an emotionectomy, the costs of doing so would be enormous.
While greatly reducing your susceptibility to the various afflictions, you would also lose most of what
gives you a reason for doing anything at all. Even intellectual work would become pointless without
the joy of discovery, the fear of failure, and the satisfaction of modest progress. Without emotional
processes in the brain that tie representations of concepts, beliefs, and goals to assessments of value,
you would lose the continuous assessment of situations and options that provides guidance about what
to pursue. All facts and theories would be equally trivial, and all courses of action would be equally
pointless. Thought and action would become equally bereft of motivation. Like a computer that lacks
the capacity to care about whether it is turned on or off, your brain would have no way of determining
what is worth thinking about or doing. All the reasons that chapter 7 presents to explain why life is
worth living would vanish. Hence the classical strategy of relinquishing or dominating emotion is no
route to wisdom.
So what are we to do if we want to be both rational and emotional? Compare eating, which can be
a highly rational enterprise if you consume healthy foods and avoid ones that will hurt your body. Just
as you cannot eliminate emotional thinking, you are not physiologically capable of abandoning eating,
whose metabolic value is great despite the negative results of consuming too many things that are bad
for you. Nutritional science enables us to learn how to eat moderately in ways that enhance rather than
limit our health. The simplest but nevertheless valuable rule I have heard is Michael Pollan's
suggestion: eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
By analogy, I propose this rule: feel emotions, not too strongly, mostly happy. We need emotions to
motivate and guide our inferences, but emotional intensity should be proportionate to their relevance
to our goals, which must be coherent with our overall interests and evidence-based beliefs. Chapter 6
describes decision making in terms of the coherence of goals and actions. Although negative emotions
such as fear, anger, and sadness are occasionally unavoidable, far more effective and pleasant
motivations come from positive emotions such as the many variants of happiness.
My rule about emotions would be useless if emotions were forces entirely out of our control, as
often seems to be the case. How can you keep yourself from feeling the full strength of emotions and
tilt yourself toward feeling more positive than negative emotions? Answers to these questions are
more a matter for clinical psychology than for my own philosophical inquiry, but the EMOCON
model points in some useful directions