Emotional Reasons

Reason is the slave of passion

~David Hume

We are motivated by our feelings, more than any of the results of analysis and logic. Hardly anything we do is 100% rational. For example, a person may decide to follow the lifestyle of celebrities, but not the work of scientists. A person who feels grateful to a school he/she attended may decide to donate a large sum of money later in life. These effects of integral emotions operate at conscious and non-conscious levels. In a recent event, the stock market returns declined when a country’s soccer team was eliminated from the World Cup. Even investing is influenced by emotions. Strange, no? Not really.

Do you think the attention Justin Bieber enjoys is justified?

A powerful person affects the feelings of people. Often, emotions outperform rationality.

A person controlling feelings has the power to close doors of rationality

I generally use my Quora account as a social experiment platform. An observation that I made is, people tend to read emotional answers more often than rational answers. The content that interacts with the feelings of people often goes viral. In terms of reading and reasoning habits, Quora’s audience is often considered better than Facebook/Instagram or other social media. Yet, the decision to make an answer go viral is fueled at the emotional level. However rational we describe ourselves, emotions have a big say in our decisions.

Interplay between emotion and rationality

Human society has always undervalued emotion. Imagine describing someone “rational” against describing someone “emotional”. We have been misled into believing that we should throw out all irrational elements of our brain or being emotional is chaotic. The fact is, we need both, rationality and feelings to live a good life. Rationality affects our emotions, and emotions affect our rationality. This is a cycle balanced by the nature.

The balance between emotion and rationality

A person without emotion is expected to be disconnected from rest of the world

A person without reasoning is expected to be chaotic and absurd.

Feeling takes care of our desires and needs now, while rationality is defending our interests and wellbeing in the future. Both are absolutely necessary for our survival and developed eventually with evolution.

Do you think emotions are stronger than rationality? I think so. We might have been trained to be rational. However, at the very core, we are emotional beings. A good painter, writer, actor, singer knows to hit the feelings of the audience, which makes him/her successful. Recall your most liked art/paint/article or any form of content. Did it hit the people at the emotional level?