14th
The irrational mind - David Brooks on the role of emotions in politics, policy, and life
New York Times columnist David Brooks said that scientists who study the mind, rather than theologians or philosophers, are yielding the most interesting answers to questions of what constitutes character, ethics, and virtue.
“Why do the most socially attuned people on earth — the people I cover [politicians] — make the most dehumanized decisions?” (…)
“We’ve inherited a view of ourselves that we’re divided selves, that we have reason over here and emotion over here,” Brooks said. “We value things we can quantify … and we tend not to devalue, but to be inarticulate about the rest.
What scientific research is showing, however is that the irrational self can hardly be suppressed. Only by embracing that perhaps-unquantifiable need for community, relationships, and other unconscious desires, he told the crowd, can people make headway in pressing problems ranging from education to foreign wars. (…)
Most thinking is unconscious, he said, and studies are showing that emotions, or unconscious responses, are most likely the foundation of the reasoning people use to make decisions.
“Emotions assign values to things,” Brooks said. “If you don’t have that valuation system, then your decision-making landscape is hopelessly flat.”
Furthermore, he added, research suggests that humans are “deeply interdependent creatures” who learn and even forge our personalities from the people we surround ourselves with.
By taking advances in our understanding of human nature into account, Brooks said, politicians and other leaders could benefit from an entirely new range of skills that have little to do with academic expertise or traditional intelligence. He cited research that the ability to learn from others, to monitor biases and shortcomings in our own thinking, to pick out larger patterns from a jumble of information, and to maximize self-restraint, among other traits, play a larger role in our success in work and in life than they’re commonly given credit for. (…)
“People start businesses that should have never been started,” Bazerman said. “We fight wars because we want to get the bad guys. … We elect George W. Bush because we’d like to have a beer with him.”
And if policies fail to address social problems, then politicians’ preference for hard data over human experience probably isn’t to blame, said David Kennedy, professor of law and director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. Even if politicians embrace a broader idea of human nature, the process of policymaking will remain conflicted and confusing.
“I don’t see the policy process as the best place where people figure out how to solve a problem,” he said.”
— Katie Koch writing about David Brooks in Learning to love the irrational mind, Harvard Gazette, April 13, 2011.
See also:
☞ Dan Ariely, Your irrational mind
☞ A risk-perception: What You Don’t Know Can Kill You
