Folly and Futility
Dave Schuler
On Wednesday Newsweek published an article which, drawing on the research of Drew Westen on how emotion influences political judgements, went on to make the point that Republicans capitalized on emotional political decision-making while Democrats have erred by basing their political campaigns on dispassionate reason. This article prompted the predictable spitting contest between the Democratic and Republican partisans in the political blogosphere.
My own view on this is that I live in Chicago and the folks revving up the crowds here are Democrats and they aren't using appeals to reason. But I don't want to get bogged down in the partisan political aspects of the discussion so, please, steer away from them if you feel moved to make a comment here.
Yesterday I posted my own thoughts on the underlying premise, i.e. that, like it or not, we're fated that our affective faculties will rule our rational ones. I've been taken to task for believing that it's possible for us to learn to cultivate reason as our approach to problem-solving. I feel in pretty good company on this since practically every religious and philosophical teacher for the last 2,500 years has taught the same thing. For example, in his Republic Plato exalted the virtue that he characterized as “the agreement of the passions that reason should rule” as the pre-eminent virtue of the citizen.
Here's what I'd like to know. What's the science? Are we hardwired for our emotions to dominate our judgments? Or, as I believe, are we hardwired for nothing of the kind but that our past experiences influence our present and future states and that, through training and practice, we can learn to consider our emotions as facts much like other facts and, while taking them into consideration in our judgments, they will not propel our judgements willy-nilly to who knows what end? I further believe that training and practice affect the actual structure and operation of the brain (which would make it darned hard to demonstrate experimentally using a random sample of individuals that we were hardwired for our emotions to rule our reason—all that would be demonstrated is that the individuals in the experiment were programmed that way).
What do you think? Remember, if this discussion degenerates into a partisan squabble, I'll either delete the offending comments or shut down the comment thread entirely.
That being said, I don't think that we're doomed to be merely apes in trowsers. The fact that I've made decisions that I didn't want to make based on arguments for why I should do it seem like pretty good evidence for me.
But that many people act more like animals than human beings is hardly surprising. All of us do it at some time, at least.
But the real main problem is the potentially faulty setting up of the emotions and reason as being opposites. Oftentimes, emotions ARE in fact rational responses and strategies that support our interests quite effectively, even if we don't sit down and figure this out consciously in every instance. Economists have a heck of a lot to say about this, because they are in the business of figuring out why certain behavior is "rational" even if many people think it's just crazy and emotional, and they have countless examples of cases in which it turns out that both are in concert.
Our understanding of how the human mind works is pretty much at the bloodletting and leeches stage. Science is an inefficient tool for figuring out how just one mind works - using it to figure out how millions of minds interact in a complex political system is just way beyond our abilities. Reading tea leaves or just plain guesswork based on past experience is probably more exact.
If we use those methods, and if we ignore all 'scientific' research publised by partisan media outlets like Newsweek and the New York Times we'll be way ahead of the game.
LOL Yeah, no kidding.
Anyways, reason is only a tool; we can use it discover E=MC^2 or to get laid or to establish a Stalinist dictatorship. Emotions (or more correctly, biochemical hormone-driven reactions) drive reason to accomplish emotional goals, be they love or compassion or hate or horniness or the will to power.
In the end what matters is principles, through which we can use reason to harness emotional drives in positive ways, e.g. through liberal capitalist democracy.
Let me just raise the prospect of filtering this discussion through the lens of the male / female cerebral divide!
Oh, I disagree on that. With the mind, we're pretty much at the stage we are with a lot of diseases: we have a pretty decent idea of how it works in a general sense and some of the good specifics, but what we don't have are any good means by which to change or fix things: a lot of the problems are on a cellular and genetic level that we have only very clumsy ways of dealing with (drugs are our best tools, but they are inherently very clumsy even at getting towards simple problems.)
I’ve seen dozens of careers derailed when the person would not (or could not?) accept that fact. Design and development engineering is an inherently self-proving field. Either your designs work, or they don’t. If they don’t, you don’t have a job very long. I’m sure software guys like Martin see this too.
Whether we are “hard wired” to be ruled by our emotions or not, I can’t say. I suspect some of us are, and some aren’t. Maybe its like left handedness or sexual preference. But obviously, some of us can learn to set our emotions aside, at least for some of the time.
I suspect there are some folks who can’t do it, or at least have a much harder time doing it. And I don’t think it’s related to what we commonly refer to as “IQ”. I’ve met some highly intelligent people who can’t seem to override their emotions in cases where it would obviously be to their advantage to do so.
And as Ron alluded, I suspect there is a real difference to this effect that’s related to sex. In 20 years, I have worked with maybe a dozen female engineers, versus literally thousands of males. And in all honesty, I would only call one or two of those females “good engineers”. I don’t know why it works that way, exactly. If I did, I could probably make a fortune off that knowledge. But I suspect it may be because it’s harder for females to override their emotional autopilots.
I would qualify to this extent: emotions should be removed from the decision making process, but are entirely legitimate in the goal-setting process.
And since goals affect decisions, decisions wll seldom be emotion-free; but the course should always be emotion => goal => reason => design => reason => correction => reason => correction ... And sometimes emotion will jump into the correction process, because goals will change.
OK, I'm going to duck now...
And there’s no need to duck.
After all, this is a reasoned, emotion free discussion…..
Men, always looking to start a fight. Good thing cooler female minds prevail.
I'm not a psychologist, I'm an engineer, and the descriptions of the two systems are based on what I understand -- I may not be using correct terminology.
In both systems, there is a scale of emotion and perceptionl; it's not just one or the other.
I think it a huge mistake to think that humans are either rational or emotional, either totally hardwired or software-upgrades only. They are all of the above in different ways, at different times, in response to different environmental stimuli, all acting on a basic set of hardware.
I think that medical science (writ broadly) isn't very far along in determining just how the body and the mind work. In large part this is due to the fact that most people cannot even ask the right questions just now. We're still in a situation that puts too much emphasis on culture and conditioning to explain behavior. The suggestion that behavior might be hardware related is as uncomfortable to the majority as Darwin's deprecation of divine special creation was to his contemporaries.
I'm sure that we'll get there eventually. Progress is being made in specific areas of medicine, biology, genetics, etc., but it's not being well-integrated just yet. I am confident too, though, that the integration won't be happening in my lifetime.
I think we believe the same think, John, we just say it differently. If something is hardwired, it can't be changed—that's definitional.
I don't think so. Women are just as good at being intellectually honest in my experience as a programmer, which is a function of emotional maturity. They just lack the hardwiring for spatial analysis and math -- and men generally make lousy mothers, which is a much more important job, evolutionarily speaking. Nature specializes for a reason.
And frankly, I'm a bit hurt my mitochondrial DNA gets discarded.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.