Are we rational or emotional beings?

If we were asked to summarize in an adjective something that defines the human being and differentiates it from other animals, we will probably refer to that ours is a rational species.

Unlike the vast majority of life forms, we can think in abstract terms related to language, and thanks to them we are able to create long-term plans, be aware of realities that we have never experienced in the first person, and speculate on how nature works, among many others things.

However, it is also true that emotions have a very important weight in the way we experience things; Mood influences the decisions we make, how we prioritize, and even how we remember. Which of these two areas of our mental life best defines us?

Are we rational or emotional animals?

What is it that differentiates rationality from the emotional? This simple question may be a topic that entire books are written about, but one thing that quickly catches your eye is that the rationality is usually defined in more concrete terms: action or thought based on reason is rational, which is the field in which the compatibilities and incompatibilities that exist between ideas and concepts are examined from the principles of logic.

That is to say, what characterizes rationality is the consistency and solidity of the actions and thoughts that emanate from it. Therefore, the theory says that something rational can be understood by many people, because the coherence of This set of ideas fitted together is information that can be communicated, as it does not depend on what subjective.

Instead, the emotional is something that cannot be expressed in logical terms, and that is why it remains "locked" in subjectivity each. Art forms can be a way of publicly expressing the nature of the emotions that are felt, but neither the interpretation that each person makes neither of these artistic works nor the emotions that this experience will evoke are the same as the subjective experiences that the author has wanted to capture.

In short, the fact that the rational is easier to define than the emotional tells us about one of the differences between these two kingdoms: the first works very well. on paper and allows to give expression to certain mental processes making others come to understand them in an almost exact way, while emotions are private, they cannot to be reproduced by writing.

However, the fact that the realm of the rational can be described more accurately than that of the emotional does not mean that it better defines our way of behaving. In fact, in a way, the opposite is true.

Bounded rationality: Kahneman, Gigerenzer ...

How emotional is so hard to define many psychologists prefer to speak, in any case, of "limited rationality". What we would used to call "emotions"It would thus be buried in a heap of tendencies and patterns of behavior that, this time, have limits that are relatively easy to describe: they are everything that is not rational.

A) Yes, Researchers such as Daniel Kahneman or Gerd Gigerenzer have become famous for conducting numerous investigations in which it is verified to what extent rationality is an entelechy and does not represent the way in which we usually act. Kahneman, in fact, has written one of the most influential books on the subject of bounded rationality: Think fast, think slowly, in which he conceptualizes our way of thinking distinguishing a rational and logical system and an automatic, emotional and Quick.

Heuristics and cognitive biases

The heuristic, the cognitive biases, all the mental shortcuts we take to take decisions in the shortest possible time and with the limited amount of resources and information that we have... all that, mixed with emotions, is part of non-rationality, because they are not procedures that can be explained through logic.

However, when push comes to shove, it is non-rationality that is most present in our lives, as individuals and as a species. Plus, many of the clues about the extent to which this is so are very easy to see.

The rational is the exception: the case of advertising

The existence of advertising gives us a clue about that. 30-second television spots in which explanations about the technical characteristics of a car are void and we cannot even see well what that vehicle is like, they can make us want to buy it, investing in it several salaries.

The same goes for all advertising in general; Advertising pieces are ways of making something sell without having to communicate in detail the technical (and therefore objective) characteristics of the product. Companies spend too many millions a year on advertising for this communication mechanism to not tell us something about how buyers make decisions, and behavioral economics has generated much research showing how decision-making based on intuitions and stereotypes are very common, practically the default purchase strategy.

Challenging Jean Piaget

Another way to see the extent to which bounded rationality is is to realize that logic and most of it of the notions of mathematics must be learned deliberately, investing time and effort in it. Although it is true that newborns are already capable of thinking in basic mathematical terms, a person you can live perfectly your whole life without knowing what logical fallacies are and constantly falling into they.

It is also known that in certain cultures adults stay in the third stage of cognitive development defined by Jean Piaget, instead of passing to the fourth and final stage, characterized by the correct use of logic. In other words, logical and rational thought, rather than being an essential characteristic of the human being, is rather a historical product present in some cultures and not in others.

Personally, I think that the latter is the definitive argument about why that part of mental life that we can associate with rationality cannot be compared to the domains of emotions, hunches and cognitive fudges that we usually do daily to get out of trouble in complex contexts that in theory should be addressed through logic. If we have to offer an essentialist definition of what the human mind defines, then rationality as a way of thinking and acting has to be left out, because it is the result of a cultural milestone reached through the development of language and writing.

Emotion predominates

The trap by which we can come to believe that we are rational beings "by nature" is probably that, compared to the rest of life, we are much more logical and prone to systematic reasoning; However, this does not mean that we think fundamentally from the principles of logic; historically, the cases in which we have done so are exceptions.

The use of reason may have very spectacular results and that it is very useful and advisable to use it, but that does not mean that reason itself is not, in itself, something to aspire to, rather than something that defines our life mental. If logic is so easy to define and define, it is precisely because it exists more on paper than in ourselves..