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?
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