intrust

Emotions represent in part a primitive past, the bubbling influences of a reptilian heritage. An assumption by rationalists, dating back to the ancient Greeks, has been that higher forms of human existence–mentation, rationality, foresight and decision-making-can be hijacked by the pirates of emotion. Indeed, the classic assumption is that emotion wreaks havoc on human rationality, that dispassionate analysis optimizes decision-making. Accordingly, the emphasis in our society has been on cognition and rationality and on ways of diminishing the influence of subjectivity and emotion in decision-making and behaviour.¹ John T. Cacioppo

It came as quite a surprise to theorizers of bounded and unbounded rationality when the acclaimed neurosurgeon Antonio Damasio wrote in 1994 that emotions were not the bane of rational thinking – but rather an essential element: ²

Work from my laboratory has shown that emotion is intergral to the processes of reasoning and decision making, for worse and for better. [...] I suggested that certain levels of emotion processing probably point us to the sector of the decision-making space where our reason can operate most efficiently. [...] Well-targeted and well-deployed emotion seems to be a support system without which the edifice of reason cannot operate properly. These results and their interpretation called into question the idea of dismissing emotion as a luxury or a nuisance or a mere evolutionary vestige. They also made it possible to view emotion as an embodiment of the logic of survival.³