In which Wolf shows how logic and emotion are both essential. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/OCRS4e3r8VA
My last video, about improvement being creating the right kind of change, was the first of what I call my “Seven Keys to Better Thinking.” These keys aren’t exactly about the process of critical thinking, which I’ve discussed before and will discuss much more in the future, but they are more about stances, or outlooks, mindsets, toward thinking that I have found to be incredibly useful in my life and career. These Keys often deal with how we integrate things that are often incorrectly considered to be opposites, or that are often incorrectly thought to be the same. So I thought I’d go ahead and introduce the other six keys in this and the next few episodes.
So in this video I’m going to discuss the tension between logic, on one hand, and emotion on the other.
Most people look at logic as a cold, complex topic. It brings to mind images of higher mathematics and nerdy professors, science fiction computers and emotionless aliens.
But the fact remains that we all think, and we all use logic with more or less skill.
What is not widely understood is that logic is simply the rules for thinking. Just as it is possible (but a bad idea) to drive a car without knowing the rules of the road, it is possible to think without understanding the rules of logic.
These rules are extremely powerful, and fortunately, quite simple. But it is unfortunate that as children we are rarely taught to use them as naturally as we learn to read and write.
And far from turning us into dispassionate machines, we humans are naturally the happiest and most productive when our emotional hearts and logical minds work together in concert.
Some people resist “being logical” on the grounds that they “just know how they feel” on a given subject. But when we experience strong emotions or gut instincts, it is important to recognize that there are always underlying causes for those feelings.
If we merely acknowledge the resulting feelings, but resist a deeper understanding of the causes, we create a disconnect between the rational and emotive parts of our minds. This disconnect results in cognitive dissonance, which is stress resulting from attempting to believe conflicting things or behave in conflicting ways.
Cognitive dissonance is a two-edged sword: on the one hand it can help motivate us to change our beliefs for the better (that is, to better reflect reality) while on the other hand it can also lead us to manufacture rationalizations for the ways we feel that don’t reflect reality. While both personal change and rationalization quell the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, rationalizing ultimately leads us deeper into trouble by putting us further and further out of sync with reality.
Attempting to act on feelings alone has a serious drawback: such actions leave us vulnerable to unintended consequences that our rational minds could have helped us predict and avoid. Of course, it works the other way too: if we try to be “purely rational,” yet ignore strong feelings by discounting their causes, we are also going to create dissonance.
The solution is to get in the habit of bringing the causes (or reasons) that underlie our emotions and instincts to the surface. In doing so, we validate our emotions, and can then integrate them into effective plans.
The good news is that thinking is a learnable skill that improves with practice, and that doing so does not diminish, but rather complements the value of emotions.