SOME OF MY READERS MAY HAVE BEEN UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THE prosaic approach expressed toward emotions in this book. If emotions, as presented here, are as rational and analytical as cognitive processes, what room is there left for the soul? Furthermore, if the most nonphysical aspect of the human experience, our “emotions,” can be predicted by DNA and the concentrations of certain hormones in the body, then could we not use similar descriptions to capture the entirety of what we call “life” and do away once and for all with the concept of spirit?
I don’t think so.
Scientific understanding enables us to capture only a partial and somewhat faint picture of the totality of human emotion and cognition. The full picture is far from being entirely clear and may never be completely clarified. Spirit and soul represent that which is hidden away from what we can explain scientifically.
The weightiest philosophical questions on the essence of the soul and of life remain unresolved. Are we, who are composed of biological cells containing DNA macromolecules that are themselves composed of carbon and hydrogen, only the sum of our parts, or is there, over and above the material composition of our bodies, an additional mysterious ingredient that distinguishes the living from the inanimate world? Is there an ingredient without which any synthetic creations that we can conjure up in a laboratory will never truly be alive?
In every scientific explanation, from the most fundamental physics through to biology and on to economics, the question of whether or not the explanation represents absolute truth is almost irrelevant. A scientific explanation is admissible if it succeeds in consistently and efficiently explaining empirical phenomena that we discover around us. Quantum theory and the theory of relativity are sufficiently simple for physicists to be convinced that they explain a vast number of physical phenomena that would otherwise be inexplicable (even though you and I may struggle to understand those theories ourselves). Yet they may be very far from the “truth,” simply because we are technologically and cognitively limited in what we can observe around us. The physical model of antiquity, which posited that the world is a flat plate beyond which lies an unfathomable abyss, is an excellent model given the empirical observations that were available when it was believed. It only ceased to be a persuasive model when seafarers returning from distant journeys told of observations that were at odds with its explanation.
The same applies to scientific explanations of human emotional and cognitive behavior. Game theory, the brain sciences, evolutionary explanations, and psychology are but a story (or several stories) intended to help us make sense of our observations of individual and group behaviors in various situations. In contrast with physical theories, behavioral theories, especially those based on game theory, have in recent years been developing at a rapid pace. This is because empirical outcomes in the behavioral sciences are much more accessible than their counterparts in physics. Neither giant telescopes nor particle accelerators are necessary to attain empirical behavioral outcomes. In the behavioral sciences, standing in a queue at the supermarket or reading a newspaper item can serve as an empirical workshop, stimulating insights in the minds of researchers that can be tested in brief and relatively inexpensive lab experiments. New insights that are empirically confirmed accumulate until they become the foundations of new stories (also known as theories) that slightly improve the resolution of the general picture that we have of what is termed “human behavior.”
The ease with which new empirical outcomes can be generated is a major advantage that accrues to behavioral research, but it is also potentially a danger for the field. While laboratories in the physical sciences can provide us with objective measurements of physical constants (in some cases up to ten decimal places), behavioral laboratories generate outcomes that may at times be given to disparate interpretations. These outcomes are sensitive not only to how the experiments were planned and executed, but also to the way the resultant data are analyzed. Researchers whose intellectual integrity may not match the most rigorous of standards and who are eager to obtain particular experimental results have been known to “torture” data until it “confesses” what the experimenter wants to hear. These sorts of actions expose behavioral laboratory results to potentially damaging manipulations. As competition between leading researchers becomes increasingly aggressive, this danger becomes ever more present.
In 2011, Tilburg University in the Netherlands terminated the employment of Diederik Stapel, a prominent professor of social psychology who was the dean of that university’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. That action followed revelations that the up-and-coming academic star had for years blatantly fabricated the data on which he had based his research work. Dozens of papers published by Stapel in leading peer-reviewed journals had to be retracted.
One of Stapel’s research efforts even attracted interest in daily newspapers throughout Europe. In that paper, titled “Meat Gets the Worst Out of You,” Stapel claimed that eating meat, or even thinking about it, turns people into selfish antisocial individuals. He based his conclusions on empirical data that he had ostensibly collected in laboratory studies, but it turned out that all the data had been entirely generated by his fertile imagination.
Investigation of Stapel’s fraudulent actions and his subsequent admission that he had conducted behavior exceptionally unworthy of a scientist cost him his career. He was removed from his position as a professor at Tilburg University and even expelled from membership in the academic societies to which he belonged. The head of an international psychological association that expelled Stapel composed a letter sent to all the members of the association warning that overly aggressive academic competition can cause people to lose their minds and commit fraud.
The entire episode itself raises interesting questions about human nature. Academic competition promises its competitors neither money nor any other material benefit as its reward. It is a competition for recognition, respect, and praise. It turns out that people can derive a great deal of pleasure from recognition and praise even when they know that they are entirely unworthy of it. Stapel’s fraudulent activity is probably not the only case of a researcher manipulating data, but it is a rare example of such blatant behavior. Academic checks and balances usually operate quite efficiently to uncover such cases, but a dose of critical thinking and skepticism is a healthy thing to maintain with respect to every behavioral research effort, including those mentioned in this book.
THE BORDER DELINEATING THE FRONTIER BETWEEN OUR INTERNAL emotional and rational systems is very thin and convoluted. In most of the occasions in which we are called upon to make decisions, whether those are monumental life-changing decisions or the most minor and mundane ones imaginable, that thin line is liable to become so blurred that it may disappear entirely. The two systems become intertwined around each other so tightly that they become inseparable. In many cases our emotions are there to enable us to arrive at rapid and nearly automatic decisions, but in other cases, especially when weighty issues are at stake, our emotions challenge our rational thought processes.
For decisions on subjects such as which job to seek or whether to continue a romantic relationship, it is not our rational mechanisms that come to the fore but our emotional ones. We almost always reach a point at which all the facts are known to us, we have gone over all the implications of each alternative several times, we know that there is no new item of information or new insight that is likely to arrive and help us make up our minds, and yet we still find ourselves unable to take that last step and decide. What holds us back is emotional, not cognitive. Rational considerations (and even material interests) translate into emotional reactions—fear versus hope, sometimes compassion versus anger, pull us in different directions like a swinging pendulum, until finally the decision comes down to which emotion is most deeply felt. That is how our decision-making “software” really works, and in most cases that is a very good thing.
Try for a moment to imagine what would happen if a “separation of authorities” were to apply to our decision making in the same way it is applied to the branches of our governments, with some decisions handled solely by our rational mechanisms and others controlled only by our emotions. To take a concrete example, consider a situation with which many of us are familiar. You arrive at your place of work one morning, switch on the computer, and find an email message from another company suggesting that you apply for a position there. It is up to you to decide whether to send a positive response to this offer or instead to decline politely and continue in your present job.
If this decision were to be relegated solely to the rational department of your mind, you would react as one might expect Mr. Spock from the planet Vulcan would react. You would begin by compiling an exact list of all the characteristics of your present job (salary, personal interest, opportunities for promotion) followed by a parallel list of the characteristics of the newly offered job. Since you have only partial information available regarding the job on offer, you will assign probabilities to each of the characteristics in the list you have compiled for that position. You will also be able to predict quite accurately the chain of events that are likely to occur once you decide to apply for the job, along with your chances of landing that job at the end of the process.
The next step would be to assign to each characteristic a value representing the extent of satisfaction or disappointment you expect to receive from it. If you are lucky and hitherto have not made any mistakes, you are almost certainly about to fail at this stage. There is almost no way to gauge values of satisfaction and disappointment without the assistance of your emotional mechanism. You will have all the facts at your disposal, but you will not be able to make a wise choice, after all that.
What would happen if instead you were to empower only your emotional mechanism to make the decision for you? You might then arrive at a decision quickly, but it would be dictated by recent events whose relationships to your long-term interests are tenuous at best. If, for example, on the previous day your boss had spoken to you in a way that irritated you, you might reply positively to the email inviting you to apply for another job and even include your boss in the list of recipients. On the other hand, if the person who sent you the email misspelled your name, or the proposed position looks at first glance as slightly less attractive than your current job, you would likely immediately reject it along with a sarcastic remark that would obliterate any chance that you would ever again be approached with a job offer. Only close cooperation between the emotional and rational mechanisms can enable you to arrive at a wise and satisfactory decision.
I hope that the examples and the many research studies surveyed in this book convince you that emotions are not a vestigial leftover of the evolutionary process from a long ago primitive past, but rather an effective and sophisticated tool for balancing and complementing our rational side. In the end, it is the feeling and thinking person who has the advantage, not the person who relies on thought alone.