WHY CAN’T PEOPLE THINK MORE RATIONALLY? RELATIVE TO THE idealized image of “the thinker,” evolution has seemingly bequeathed to us several flaws. How else can we explain why we are so emotional? Of what benefit is it to a person to become angry? In a world as competitive as the one we inhabit, why are we occasionally struck by a sense of humility? Why do we turn beet red, making ourselves more noticeable at precisely the moments in which we most want to bury ourselves underground out of profound shame? As long as we are on this point, why feel shame at all? Or regret? Why are we filled with a burning passion for love? And what in the world possesses us to insist on fidelity to only one lover? Or to volunteer for the most dangerous military missions? There are a plethora of actions that we would simply refuse to undertake at all if we were only to stop a moment to think about them intelligently, carefully analyze the threats versus the opportunities, and coolly calculate the net benefits. At the same time, if we were to refuse to do them, we would cease to be human beings.
Mr. Spock, a character from the television series Star Trek, would regularly regard his shipmates on the starship Enterprise with a look of forgiveness mixed with arrogance. As a native of the planet Vulcan, Spock, in marked contrast to us, acted solely out of emotionless considerations of reason and logic. Is the sense of inferiority that we feel as we watch him act calmly and coolly in the face of the grave crises that he faced on Star Trek justified? The truth is that if the human race had developed along the lines of the emotion-free inhabitants of Vulcan, our lives would be considerably more difficult, and in all likelihood we would not have survived at all.
Many of us tend to think of decision making as a process in which two separate and opposite mechanisms are engaged in a critical struggle, with the emotional and impulsive mechanism within us tempting us to choose the “wrong” thing while the rational and intellectual mechanism that we also carry inside us slowly and ploddingly promises to lead us eventually to make the right choice. This description, which was also shared by many scientists until a few decades ago, is both simplistic and wrong.
Our emotional and intellectual mechanisms work together and sustain each other. Sometimes they cannot be separated at all. In many cases a decision based on emotion or intuition may be much more efficient—and indeed better—than a decision arrived at after thorough and rigorous analysis of all the possible outcomes and implications. A study conducted at the University of California at Santa Barbara indicates that in situations in which we are moderately angry, our ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant claims in disputed issues is sharpened. Another study that I coauthored reveals that our inclination to become angered grows in situation in which we can benefit from anger. In other words, there is logic in emotion and often emotion in logic.
How do emotions influence our decision making? Do they hinder us or help us? What is their role in social situations? How are collective emotions formed? What are the evolutionary mechanisms that made us both thinking and emotional creatures? This book attempts to answer these questions using insights from the latest research studies published in recent years “on the seam” between emotions and rationality.
The new insights that have been obtained about the role of emotions are an outcome of a quiet revolution that has occurred over the past two decades in three important research disciplines: brain sciences, behavioral economics, and game theory. These three together have in recent years expanded our understanding of all aspects related to human behavior. If in the past emotions were studied mainly in psychology, sociology, and philosophy, while rationality was the preserve of economics and game theory, today both the study of rationality and the study of emotions are active research subjects for scholars in all those fields.
Game theory and behavioral economics, the academic fields in which I specialize, are rapidly expanding subjects within economics. Over the past two decades twelve Nobel Prizes in economics were awarded to researchers in those two fields. Their influence is felt well beyond the gates of academia. The behavioral economist Cass R. Sunstein, for example, is currently the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in US President Barack Obama’s administration. His colleague Richard H. Thaler is a member of a unit called the Behavioral Insight Team set up by British Prime Minister David Cameron in his Cabinet Office to serve as an in-house consulting board.
Although this book is not based on one and only one school of thought, it contains a personal and consistent statement. This statement can be summarized using the apparently paradoxical combination of words: “rational emotions.” Research in behavioral economics and the popular literature that it has spawned, including books composed by my friends Dan Ariely1 and Daniel Kahneman,2 tends to concentrate on mental deviations that lead us away from rational decision making, and in some cases can harm us. In my opinion this is an overly pessimistic position. In contrast, I will try to point out how emotions serve us and further our interests, including our most material and immediate interests.
It is impossible to conduct a discussion on this subject without making use of two important research fields: game theory and the theory of evolution.
Game theory, which is essentially the study of interactive decisions, is necessary because humans are social creatures who interact with their environments. The game theoretic approach enables us to understand the roles that emotions and other behavioral characteristics have within a context of social interaction. Without it, we would be exposed to only “one side of the coin,” and we would have only a partial understanding of our own behaviors.
The theory of evolution is also vital for understanding human behavior. An evolutionary claim is intended to explain how a behavioral characteristic helps (or has in the past helped) human species to survive. Like physical developments in humans and other living creatures, human behavioral developments are the results of a “package deal”: a behavioral characteristic or inclination that appears to be an obstacle in one decision context is in many cases an important advantage in other decision contexts.
I have naturally emphasized the research that my research partners and I have conducted, but I have also included research results obtained by many of my colleagues and students at the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which I had the honor of directing for the past several years, as well as the research of many other leading scholars throughout the world. These research efforts are based on both theoretical insights and laboratory experiments, which over the past several decades have come to replace the surveys and questionnaires that had previously been the main empirical study tools of the social sciences.
My use of the term “emotions” is broader than the meaning attached to that word in common speech. I include as emotions not only concepts such as anger and worry, which are regarded by everyone as emotions, but also concepts that are typically thought of as social norms, such as fairness, equality, and magnanimity. This is not an attempt to define what is an emotion (something that I deliberately avoid doing), but instead comes from a desire to study an extensive range of phenomena that impact what might otherwise be perfectly rational thinking. The insights developed in this book are not restricted to economic decisions; they relate to a wide array of topics that include conclusions about society, politics, religion, family, sexuality, and art.
Feeling Smart is designed to enable readers who may not necessarily be up-to-date with the latest social science research to join in the fascinating discussion that is taking place on the relationship between emotions and rational behavior.
I wish to thank Benjamin Adams, who made his excellent editorial suggestions in both a rational and a sensitive manner, and my friend Ziv Hellman, who did most of the translation of this book from its original Hebrew publication in a way that no one else could do better. I owe a special debt to my research partners, my teachers, my colleagues, and my students at the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the intellectual interactions that I have been privileged to have with them, along with my research work, constituted the raw material for this book. Those interactions, despite being intellectual and rational, are forever also emotional for me.