Poem. No title.

I woke up as the sun went down.
A demon visited me while I slept,
Traces of terror linger still gripped my organs.
It was like an inversion of the soul,
Suddenly everything was born up and
Exposed to the searing light of judgment.
My stomach rose to my throat
As the floor opened beneath me.
Like Icarus who flew to close to the sun
And melted his waxen wings.
The balloon of my hubris burst,
And there was nothing to stop the fall.

On Emotions and Free Will: What are emotions, and why do we have them?

In this essay (broken into three parts for publishing), I will first explore ancient and contemporary theories of emotion and arrive at a practical, working concept capable of informing behavioral hypotheses. Secondly, I will reopen the debate on the existence of free will in light of recent discoveries about the role of emotions in decision-making. In the context of this discussion, I will propose a novel redefinition of the concept of free will that treats it not as a metaphysical quality of mind, but as a cultural invention serving as a notional goal of rational thought. Lastly, I will place these conclusions in the context of contemporary and future research on the phenomenon known as motivated reasoning.

What are emotions, and why do we have them?

It is unnatural for us to ask this question, for emotions are so seamlessly woven into our conscious (and unconscious) experience. So seamless are they, that they can often be mistaken for a feature of our souls. I say 'soul' because I mean to imply our sense, real or not, of our true being. For as long as we have had historical records, philosophers, poets, artists, scientists, and other delinquents prone to ask unnatural questions, have sought to disentangle emotion from the soul so that it may be understood on its own. According to psychologist George E. Marcus, the oldest presumption regarding the psychology of emotion is the separation of emotion from the practice of reason. Even today, we commonly hold the metaphorical view that, somehow, “passions arise from the 'heart' and reason from the 'mind'.” Further, we often view these “forces” as occupying the opposite ends of a linear spectrum: the more emotional someone is, the greater the likelihood that “obsession, delusion, and demagoguery will hold sway” (Marcus, p. 188). Similarly, an overabundance of reason seems fastidious, cold, and inhuman. Though essentially human in form, Dr. Spock's most alien characteristic was his lack of emotions and famously stalwart adherence to “logic”.

Historical Views

At least since Plato, the dominant perspective in psychological approaches to government has been that the role of emotion is profoundly negative. In Plato's Alegory of the Cave, he describes humanity as born in the darkness of a cave. Never knowing anything else, he confuses shadows and shapes playing on the wall before him will real things. Under the oppressive rule of corporeal desire, he spends his whole life chasing at illusions, for he could not be distracted for a moment to reflect on his depravity and find his way out to the realm of light and reason. Across the great Eurasian landmass, 12^th century Buddhist luminary Shinran similarly described the passions as “an instinctual, emotive force arising from the unconscious and deeply rooted in the body” that once “entwined with egocentric human calculations ... becomes distorted and causes havoc in our lives".

For Plato, as well as virtually all western political philosophy up through the Enlightenment and the United States Constitution, emotions are considered baser instincts. Thus, a crucial goal of any governmental design is to subjugate emotion to reason. In his Second Treatise, Locke writes: “The freedom then of man and liberty of acting according to his own will, is grounded on his having reason, which is able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him to know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will”. In other words, the capacity for reason is precisely the mental faculty that makes intellectual freedom possible, and to ensure this it must be employed in the construction of political regimes. Some one-hundred years later, James Madison extended this idea in The Federalist Paper #10, asserting that “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.” Accordingly, he and his coauthors designed a form of constitutional government with institutional checks and balances capable of mitigating the most severe impacts of passion while making positive use of the motivating force of emotion.

Contemporary Views

The intuitive understanding of emotion espoused by the great philosophers has shown remarkable staying power and has played a prominent role in western history and political thought. But what is emotion really? Modern science has advanced several theories. In general, the scientific perspective on emotions is that they function as heuristics, or cognitive rules of thumb. In other words, they are a efficient shortcuts in decision-making, allowing decisive behavior in time-impacted situations, at speeds many times faster than what can be achieved through deliberate thought processes. Emotions may facilitate appraisal of a stimuli and discharge a response even before conscious awareness of the stimuli has been achieved. Evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides proffered a bare-bones definition of emotions as the basic means by which living creatures solve the problem of “approach” and “avoidance” (1990). This simplified perspective captures the idea that emotions, for humans or any creature, have the functional purpose: to rapidly establish a disposition with regard to an object in the world. If the object is deadly, such as a predator, rational cognition would be too slow. Thus, emotions evolved as a mechanism to compress the information-space to a single bit of data: approach or avoid; or alternatively, good or bad, positive or negative.

A simple approach/avoid model seems to make intuitive sense for a lizard, but what about humans? Psychologists have not strayed from the approach/avoidance assumption, but human models of emotion have generally supplied them with a greater number of “dimensions” on which to appraise an object. I will discuss briefly discuss three such theories. First, valence-arousal theory describes appraisals along two orthogonal dimensions: valence (good or bad) and level of excitation, or arousal. For example, high-levels of both arousal and valence may produce emotions such as enthusiasm, delight, or elatedness, while low-levels of both may produce gloominess or misery. Under an appraisal of high arousal and extremely low valence, we might experience fear or anxiety; under the opposite we might feel tranquil or content.

Second, the theory of discrete emotion also relies on binary, positive-negative appraisals, but applies them according to a hierarchy of considerations. For example, the precise feeling, or emotion experienced is determined by 1) valence, and 2) whether there are rewards or punishments, 3) how certain the rewards/punishments are to realize, and 4) to whom they will go (the experiencer or someone else).

A third theory, multiple systems of emotions, is more complex still. Multiple systems theory asserts that different emotional systems operate simultaneously to facilitate automatic behavior in response to various kinds of stimuli (good, bad, and everything in between), but also to control attention on any one in particular. These systems enable attention to be shifted from one thing to another but also sustain the ability to focus attention more deeply and ignore distraction. This can be crucial. For example, if a child is missing, the sense of terror communicates urgency to the mother and may block out all other concerns, focusing all of her cognitive resources on the single task of finding the child. In Marcus' view, the multiple systems view has the advantage of a more solid grounding in recent neuroscientific discoveries. Specifically, he argues that the functions of successive layers of emotional systems map on to neural subsystems in the brain, i.e. somatosensory, associative memory, and declarative memory systems. Without getting too deeply into the details of his criticism, Marcus argues that the dimensional models are overly simplistic and cannot account for the diversity of human emotional experience, nor the totality of roles they play in decision-making. I do not disagree with this, however, his theory may as well be incomplete.

While Marcus may identify a behavioral role for diverse spectrum of emotion, multiple systems theory is fundamentally a more dramatic reconstruction of a basic approach/avoidance mechanism. This view is not no much wrong as it is incomplete. In fact, it very well may suffice for most of animalia---for a given asocial creature, its relationship with respect to any object should be reflected in a one-dimensional linear distance function. On a single dimension, there are only two possible moves: approach or avoid, which may only be moderated by speed. Bases for decision are straightforward: Can I eat it? Mate with it? Will it eat me? Make me sick? Some combination thereof? Can I think about this for a while, or do I have make a decision now? For a (comparatively) small number of species, the addition of a social dimension creates opportunity for (and meaningfullness of) lateral movement. A social creature's relationship to an object is reflected in a distance function that includes not only the object, but the sum of all dyadic relationships in an n-object community. For any two social creatures, their relationship may be triangulated from their known relationship to a third. This notion is inherent in the aphorisms “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” or “Any friend of yours is a friend of mine”. Marcus appears to have attained a loose intuition this notion, but perhaps not enough to apprehend its significance. Citing a growing body of neuroscientific research, Marcus writes:

“As we gain greater insight into how the brain is organized, we may well learn more about how humans function as social and reasoning creatures (Damasio,1994; Goleman, 1995). Even in the task of moral judgment, recent research in neuroscience establishes the central role of emotions in the resolution of moral dilemmas (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, and Cohen, 2001) (Marcus, 2003).

Contemporary psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes a promising alternative perspective. In his effort to understand the psychological basis for morality, Haidt draws upon lessons from biology and evolutionary psychology (the lessons of Tooby and Cosmides), and postulates five foundations of moral judgment: care for others, fairness, loyalty to one's group, respect for authority, and purity. For Haidt, these are basic criteria for moral judgment (Haidt, 2007). Emotional responses to observations of another's behavior or condition (i.e., empathy for their suffering, anger at their treachery, or indignation at their disregard for social mores) drive moral judgment, and by extension they will govern social interaction. Unlike the Marcus' multiple systems model, Haidt's model is built from the ground up as a social theory of emotion. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The former may suffice to explain a basic scheme of approach/avoidance common to animalia (humans among them), while the latter sits atop in a multi-tiered theory of emotion necessary to explain the more complex geometry of a social species.

Haidt's model illuminates an adaptive, functional role human emotional diversity in a way the multiple systems model cannot. Marcus correctly points out that adaptive purposes for which emotional systems evolved are far too complex for a simple, one or two-dimensional good/bad basis of object appraisal. This is as much an oversimplification as attempting to reduce the gustatory palette, or the set of various tastes associated with different foods, to simply 'good' or 'bad'. One commonly held misconception illustrates this point. For example, if you ask a normal person (not us) why a delectable piece of fine Belgian chocolate is so delicious and they will like tell you that it is because it is so sweet and richly satisfying. If they are a bit more sophisticated, they might suggest that this is due to its abundance of fat and sugar. But there is nothing inherently satisfying about fat, nor is sugar inherently sweet. On the contrary, these 'tastes' are neurological adaptations allowing us to discern which materials from our environment are good for eating, and those that were not. The positive psychological experience accompanying the taste is merely nature's way of enticing us to choose this food over less nutritious alternatives. In the case of rich Belgian chocolate, that sweet, sensuous euphoria washing over you as it softly melts to a sultry goo in your mouth is an indirect impression of a readily digestible, energy dense material. At nine calories per gram, fats are the most energy dense food source available to us. Ergo, bacon is heavenly. Yielding almost 12 calories per gram, gasoline might taste even better if it were not, of course, extremely poisonous. Were you to try it, you would no doubt find so repulsively bitter and acrid in the extreme that you would spit it out at once and spontaneously vomit out the entire contents of your stomach just in case a small quantity slipped past your gullet. These two examples, chocolate and gasoline, may exemplify the extremes of 'bad' and 'good' experiences with food, but the palette and somatosensory system associated with it is precise instrument capable of discriminating multiple categories of nutritional properties of a material. For women, the physical demands of pregnancy can deplete their stores of various essential vitamins and minerals, resulting in sometimes (famously) bizarre cravings for exceedingly specific food types. In some cases, women may experience cravings for materials not generally considered to be foods, such as soil or chalk. In order to discern which foods can provide the nutrients she requires, she requires somatosensory spectrum capable of producing a wide-diversity of experience.

I regret belaboring this analogy with taste, but I feel it is essential to convey how important it would be for a social creature to have a similarly (or perhaps even more) precise “emotional palette” for the detection the nuanced situational dynamics of a large-n social sphere and the discharge of an appropriate behavior. As Haidt discussed with an audience at Ted Conference in 2008, “The righteous mind was designed by evolution to unite us into teams divide us against other teams.” With the righteous mind, we are able to maintain norms of social behavior that deepen cooperation and ultimately make our communities stronger and more resilient than others. With the righteous mind, opportunists may navigate the social world, steeped in culture and norms, to advance his individual interests and capture adaptive advantage from his peers. They keep us constantly apprised of fluctuations in the social fabric presenting momentary opportunities to advance our standing in the competition for status, resources, and mates. Moral judgments inform him whom to form coalitions, friendships forged with brotherly affinity, of whom to be wary, with whom to rival for power and how to charge him with impropriety. Within the social sphere, we feel camaraderie, intimidation, humility, shame, pride, indignation, and many other emotions for which theory expects no comparable experience for an asocial creature.

Summary

To summarize my views on emotions, emotions are strings and we are puppets hanging from them. The puppet master, the ultimate master for whom we dance upon the stage of the world like marionettes, is our genome. As we are enculturated within a society, we learn the consequences of our behavior in terms of emotions, feelings of guilt, shame, accomplishment or appreciation, just as we learn what foods taste like: experience interacting with innate faculties producing emotional dispositions. Culture is software, but the emotional subsystems with which we interact with culture are hardware. When children aren't too busy stuffing myriad objects into their mouths, they experiment with social behaviors like hitting, grabbing, cheating, stealing, and also sharing, cooperating, and hugging. Hopefully, there is a parent or caretaker around to apply the right amounts of discipline and praise to equip them with the correct associations of emotions with behaviors that will assist them in comporting their behavior with what society expects of them. The social emotions compress this vital information in the same way bout past social interactions, just as taste compresses information about the nutritional content of honey. They tell us who is safe to cooperate with, and who must be avoided. Further, they enable us to cultivate relationships with others that deepen cooperation, through the proliferation of norms of behavior.

Continue to Part 2: What is Free Will, and why do we think we have it?

On Emotions and Free Will: What is free will, and why do we think we have it? (Part 2 of 3)

Return to Part 1: What are emotions, and why do we have them?

Wikipedia defines 'free will' as “the purported ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints”. Historically, debates on whether we truly have it have swung largely on how these constraints are defined. In other words, the answer depends on one's conception of the source of determinism, be it metaphysical (ie., inviolability of God's foreknowledge of the future), physical, or political. The concern over physical determinism may in principle lend itself to scientific inquiry, but for the moment physics seems a bit flustered with quantum randomness, and is at least temporarily inclined to keep silent on the matter until the Theory of Everything is finally attained. Recently, the “cognitive revolution” in psychology has revealed the specter of cognitive determinism. This conception tends to treat free will as an illusion created by extremely complex patterns of interaction, which however complex, are in reality reducible to a comparatively simple and finite set of rules. Behavior is in this view an extremely complex, mathematical fractal. The pattern is so complex, however, that to any sub-omniscient observer is likely to appear as if there is no pattern at all. Thus, giving way to an illusion of free will, at least insofar as decisions to not appear to be predetermined.

Disappointingly (or perhaps thankfully?), my goal for this section of the paper is not to elucidate a new construction of determinism based on the latest cognitive psychology and neuroscience. For me, the more interesting (or at least more answerable) question is not whether we have it, but why we think we have it. By asking the question in this way, we avoid the trap having to define 'free will' arbitrarily, as Wikipedia and so many others have done. Instead, I will build upon the previous discussion of the behavioral role of emotion, and present a novel theory of free will that treats it not a cognitive, or spiritual faculty but a functional form of cultural technology, invented in the context of early civilizations in order to subdue the influence of social emotions, which while sufficient for resolving social problems at the level of bands and tribes, are less fit to the task at the level of states.

According to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, the cognitive faculty for generalized intelligence was an adaptation allowing individuals to more successfully interact with “evolutionarily novel” things. For Kanazawa, something is evolutionarily novel if it is something too newly introduced into a creature's environment that it is not possible for a physical or psychobehavioral mechanism facilitating an optimal response to have evolved by natural selection. For example, greater intelligence may facilitate tool-building or with the application of new jobs to put those tools to in order to enhance one's adaptive advantage. In other words, it allows individuals to respond more readily to environmental changes that the slow pace of evolution would ordinarily permit by means of understanding and innovation.

Undoubtedly, the transition from bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers to centralized, agrarian civilization introduces an immense quantity of novelty into the human environment. This transition amounted to a fundamental socio-economic restructuring of society. Bioarchaeological evidence and ethnographic studies of extant hunter-gather groups suggest that humans have persisted in comparatively small groups of 150 or so since at least the late-mid Pleistoscene (approx. 150 thousand years ago). For primates, relative neocortex size is a linear function of group size (Aiello and Dunbar, 1993). According to the Aiello-Dunbar model, the expected value of the mean human group size is, indeed, 150. Yet it has been only 5000 years or so Sumerian civilization first began to coalesce around the ancient city of Uruk. In what was quite “sudden”, at least from the perspective of evolutionary time, humans found themselves living in societies numbering in 10s of thousands. At the time of Plato's tenure at the Lyceum, the population of Athens is estimated to exceed 250 thousand (Cartledge estimate), including Athenian citizens, women and children, aliens, and slaves. Throughout the primate world, the relative size of the neocortex positively predicts social group size. Suffice it to say, humanity entered the era of urban civilization with the same intellectual equipment that saw them through the last 150 thousand years, and no more.

Suddenly, they are compelled to interact on a daily basis with more individuals than they could ever hope to recognize. With each additional denizen, the number of dyadic relationships (as a measure of social systemic complexity) increases exponentially. The division of labor into food-producing and non-producing sectors necessitated the exchanging of goods in markets. Market exchanges, by design, facilitate anonymous cooperation. In other words, individuals now found themselves involved in sometimes inscrutable social networks consisting of large numbers of unknown others. The terms of such exchanges may be determined by imperceptible forces, such as the supply and demand for primary and secondary goods.

It is my contention that the social emotional system humans had theretofore relied upon failed within the new urban environment, placing far greater demand on intelligence as the capacity to resolve novel problems. Social emotions such as trust were no longer adequate to inform an individual of the risk associated with a given, anonymous cooperative exchange. Whereas the lines between communities, or societies, were sharply drawn and largely coextensive with kinship ties in the realm of hunter-gatherers, we were suddenly immersed in imagined communities of nations, bound not by kinship or even mutual recognition, but by national songs, symbols, and religions. Increasing social distance rendered obsolete evolved social emotional tools for resolving social dilemmas. For example, shame became less useful as a means to enforce contributions to public goods, such as collective security, resources management, and civic order (i.e., the free-rider problem). Accordingly, it was necessary to develop more complex and more capable governmental institutions and political processes for decision-making. Perhaps best analogized in John Locke's conceptualization of the social contract, the urban imperative to resolve social dilemmas demanded that individuals subdue anger and forgo their natural right to exact their own justice in response to perceived transgressions, and grant this authority to a disinterested third-party, i.e., a government who would administer justice impartially according to a set of (notionally) agreed upon procedures, or laws.

New social institutions were necessary to keep up with evolving political and economic institutions. If individuals cannot be kept track of by name and face, then they must have a legal identity to which novel forms of property, such as holdings of gold or lands, may be legally attached. Succeeding in this environment takes more than strength and agility; to be the greatest hunter is no longer check and mate under the new rules of social chess. Whereas passions such as love, infatuation, fear and intimidation were once adequate indicators of the a potential mate's suitability, it now became more important to make such decisions as strategic agreements joining the wealth with of families fiercely competing for favorable position in a stratified politico-economic empire. At the level of high-politics, feelings of disgust or love must be swallowed and reason should light the way.

Recalling from the previous discussion, philosophers going back at least to Plato wrestled with the challenge emotions presented not only for the individual, but for society as a whole. For Plato, establishing a rationally ordered and governed society could only be achieved if a philosopher became king; further, this could not be any philosopher, but one who was isolated from the rest of society at birth, cared for, and specially trained in the art of pure reason. From The Republic, Plato writes:

“You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after the' own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.” - Book VII

Citing Bechara's experiments on patients whose conditions prevented them from experiencing emotions, Marcus explains how emotion is necessary to motivate action. According to Bechara, even when his subjects were able to rationally identify the best course of action, they could not act upon it. It may have been precisely this characteristic that Plato believed made a true philosopher uniquely qualified to be king. Having no motivation of his own, his perception of the good would not be biased in the direction of self-interest; in other words, he would be free from the affliction of motivated reasoning (more on this later).

According to Marcus (2003), “civilization is … the achievement that results when humans find the institutional means of removing the passions and their power”. This is precisely the conclusion I aim to unsettle. On the contrary, it is my contention that civilization is not the consequence, but the cause. In sum, social emotion was frequently as much of a hindrance as an aid for ancients city-dwellers navigating unnaturally large, post-tribal, social hierarchies, defined by organizational complexity, Machiavellian politics, and anonymous economic transactions. To succeed in this novel environment, it was necessary to subordinate emotion to the practice of dispassionate, logical reasoning. In the primordial environment of evolutionary adaptation, such a capacity would have been superfluous and not selected for. Thus, this was a skill, or tool, that needed inventing.

At Plato's Lyceum, the camp of Pythagoras, and the porch of the Stoics, logical reasoning was developed as a technology to extend the utility of general intelligence, in the same way a hammer extends the utility of a fist. This was a direct, cultural response to the new demands of urban civilization. Indeed, scores on the modern standard for the measurement of one's capacity for logical reasoning, the IQ-test, show higher average IQs urban areas than in rural. Over the past 100 years, the term Flynn Effect has been used to describe a global pattern of increasing IQ scores as a linear function of development. In order to facilitate success, children in developing and developed societies attend many years of schooling, well into young adult-hood, in order to cultivate their facility with the practice of reason. Their educational success, in turn, is predictable by educational quality, which correlates with IQ.

As I'd mentioned previously, free will is generally held to be capacity for agents to make decisions free of some understanding of the constraints on decision-making. Conceived thusly, the question may never be answered to everyone's satisfaction. On the contrary, I'm far less ambitious in my desires, hopes, and dreams for cognitive freedom. I contend free will is only an idea that serves as a theoretical outcome of a perfected art of reasoning. It is no more a real thing than the perfect circle or the perfect square. It is an epitome, comparable to a Platonic Form, that serves only as a guide to reason. Plato really believed that a philosopher was capable of perfecting reason and gaining True knowledge of the Forms, including the Form of the Good, or that which shines upon the Forms to make them knowable. For Plato, it was the knowledge of the Form of the Good that liberated man from his corporeal addiction to ephemeral things. This same idea can be seen 2000 years later in the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754),“Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce; and it is in the consciousness of this liberty, that the spirituality of his soul chiefly appears”. Though Rousseau ultimately goes a different direction with free will, he follows Plato in that he asserts free will can only exist insofar as man is aware of his animal-like condition, and thus aware of his liberty to disregard, or acquiesce corporeal impulses. Further, like Plato he holds that it is through the practice of reason that one attains the highest awareness of his nature, in principle, culminating in the true liberation of the will.

This notion of free will has given a goal toward which we may direct our education. In so doing, we are equipped with the skills to thrive in an evolutionarily novel environment where over-reliance the social emotional systems that aided our primordial ancestors' success would leave us tactless, impolitic, or otherwise disadvantaged in virtually every sphere of public life. On the basis of free will, we have built a framework of legal concepts and political institutions that facilitate a rational ordering of society as a whole, overcoming social dilemmas, and extending cooperation across unnaturally large and heterogeneous communities. Though the question of 'free will' in the traditional sense may never be found, it remains a useful concept in the same way a mathematical or geometric concept, such as that of a circle. Do we really believe that a perfect circle exists? No, but then it doesn't matter because the idea of one is enough.

Continue to Part 3: Conclusions, discussion, and implications for political science

Return to Part 1: What are emotions, and why do we have them?

On Emotions and Free Will: Conclusions, discussion, and implications (Part 3 of 3)

Return to Part 1: What are emotions, and why do we have them?

Return to Part 2: What is Free Will, and why do we think we have it?

From the above analysis, we learned that neither a valence model of emotion is an oversimplification of the human emotional systems. While it may capture in a very basic way an “approach/avoidance” tendency, the social networks humans find themselves in do not always lend themselves to unidimensional motion. Moral judgments, in turn, are more easily mapped onto conventional political ideological frameworks and predict political behavior quite successfully. Jonathan Haidt's five foundations of moral judgment are rooted in a second-tier, social emotional adapted to facilitate successful payoffs from social interaction.

These social emotions were designed by evolution, for the most part, when humans live in comparatively small groups of around 150 individuals. In today's large-n, complex organizational forms, social emotions can be out of place. Harnessing humanity's innate capacity for general intelligence, the practice of logical reasoning developed along side urbanization as an intellectual aid, or tool, to help both individuals and societies overcome social dilemmas under such evolutionarily novel circumstances. With the possible exception of the great Kant himself, nobody is so well disciplined through education to truly extirpate emotion and truly liberate his reasoning processes from the emotional undertow. It may be worth mentioning that Kant still thought we should try, and in the form of his Categorial Imperative thesis, illustrated how this might work in practice. In Platonic language, no one has managed to fully escape from the cave and gain knowledge of the Form of Free Will, though same may approximate it more closely than others. Within those imperfections, however tiny, emotion gains traction on the mind, tugging on and deforming our wits. The result is a capacity for reason, but the inability to render it impartially or disinterested. We are, in effect, motivated reasoners.

Motivated reasoning describes the effect of a set of cognitive biases that bias judgment in the direction of previously held preferences or conclusions. Specifically, the theory holds that people enter the process of reasoning favoring one conclusion among the set of possible conclusions, and will seek out rational justifications for the conclusion, while disregarding justifications which would point toward and alternative conclusion (Kunda, 1990). Consequently, their capacity for exercising reason is less about rationality than it is about rationalizing. Numerous empirical studies have in neuroscience and cognitive psychology offer corroborating evidence that emotions continue to bias judgment (Damasio, 1999; Lodge & Taber, 2000, 2005; Marcus, Newman, & MacKuen, 2000).

Assuming this thesis is true, we should expect significant implications for the study of politics. According to Lodge and Taber,

“Our studies show that people are often unable to escape the pull of their prior attitudes and beliefs, which guide the processing of new information in predictable and sometimes insidious ways. But what does this mean for citizens in a democracy? From one perspective the average citizen would appear to be both cognitively and motivationally incapable of fulfilling the requirements of rational behavior in a democracy. Far from the rational calculator portrayed in the enlightenment prose and spatial equations, homo politicus would seem to be a creature of simple likes and prejudices that are quite resistant to change.”

Plato would not be surprised by these remarks. In the Republic, after all, he articulated a model of government that was authoritarian rather than democratic. For Plato, achieving the requisite level of philosophical sophistication to become truly rational would only be possible for very rare individuals with “golden” nature. The more democratic Rousseau would not be surprised, either, but rather would insist that by becoming aware of our natural instincts, i.e., by becoming aware of ourselves as motivated reasoners, we gain the power to acquiesce nature's impulse and recover liberty.

Elsewhere, Taber posed the question: What are the consequences for the practice of political science of treating voters as motivated reasoners? Forgive me for answering a question with a question, but what would be the consequences of continuing to treat them in a way that is inconsistent with their nature? Since the dawn of civilization, humans have relied on their capacity for generalized intelligence to invent new intellectual tools to help them cope with urban life. Today, the pace of change is faster than ever. In the last 100 years, the world has undergone greater social, economic, political, and technological transformation than at any time in the past, or perhaps ever. Our lives are spent immersed in evolutionary novelty. An omnipresent electronic telecommunications bombards citizens with sensationalized, purposefully emotive information than ever before, an event unforeseen by the Enlightenment luminaries whom we have to thank for our current system. Alas, we must now consider that the set of intellectual and political organizational technologies we developed to help us cope with the previous 500 years are now obsolete, and thus we should commence the search for new ones. The only way for a such a quest to succeed is on the sure footing of scientific reality. If, in fact, voters are motivated reasoners, then it is not a choice for political science whether to treat them as such, but our duty. For it is incumbent upon us to devise the new, relevant technologies that will help us cope with the present and the future.

Return to Part 1: What are emotions, and why do we have them?

Return to Part 2: What is Free Will, and why do we think we have it?