It’s more important to teach ourselves to handle any outcome, instead of harping too much on the choices. Although we can try to optimize our decision making process for ourselves and leverage frameworks and other tools to try to make the right decisions all the time, the most useful thing may be to learn to be OK with any outcome, making decision-making relatively inconsequential.
Attendees
Jose, Jason, Mingming, Nikhil, Rohit, Kebone, Gopal, Aakash, Eric, Ashley
Moderator
Introduction
Village is a diverse community of people who are genuinely curious about understanding the world and the people around them better. We get together once a month for moderated discussions on important issues like sustainability, health & wellbeing, and education. At last month’s dinner, we discussed growth. You can read the full write-up on our previous discussion here.
This month, we shifted our focus to rationality and more specifically, when reason gets it wrong (🧠 vs. ❤️). We often find ourselves faced with the reality that reason falls short. Standing at the base of one of the great cathedrals, one must acknowledge that reason motivates less than religion. Things don’t seem to have to make sense to nonetheless work. If reason could solve the big questions about life, they would already be solved. During VFC dinner #8, we discussed rationality vs. emotion - when does reason fall short, how should we determine when to follow our gut / heart instead of our mind, is it possible to balance these forces? In this post, we take you through our full discussion with the group 👇.
What are examples of times when rationality has failed for you?
Negotiations
When people get into negotiations, they often become motivated by emotions – it becomes a game of me vs. you. Even if there is a possibility of achieving an outcome that is beneficial to everyone involved in the negotiation, people may ultimately view negotiations as having 1 winner and 1 loser.
“The best negotiation advice I ever got was to never negotiate.”
Poker
Assuming every player at the table is playing rationally (by the book), it doesn’t make sense to make bets that are dependent on statistically rare outcomes, but sometimes players choose to go with their gut feeling, and end up rewarded. Oftentimes, these rare occurrences of straying from the book are the deciding factor in who wins, and who loses.
Religion
For one member, choosing not to participate in religion was a rational decision for him – he wondered “how could people blindly follow these things that are unproven?” However, later in life, this individual found himself missing the sense of community that comes along with religion, but felt that he could never participate sincerely because he had already opened the can of worms of doubt.
Are rationality and emotions really opposing?
One of the views that was widely expressed and accepted by the VFC community overall was that pure rationality (no emotions, no individualistic value judgements, etc.) is difficult or near impossible to strive for because humans are emotional beings. Whether in work or in one’s personal life, emotions are always influencing the way we make decisions. To have emotions inform decision making may not necessarily be a failure of rationality, but a necessary component of rationality itself (to be rational is to be in tune and act accordingly with emotions).
Emotions are heuristics that have been passed over through evolution that are representative of rationality.
In situations where we have to make decisions quickly, we default to an emotional reaction. Although these emotional reactions may incorporate less active thinking, that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t rational – just less thoughtful. This is especially true in cases where thinking through the decision deeply would be too difficult - either there is too little time or too many variables to consider, and therefore people default to emotional reactions.
One member expressed that even in cases where thinking about what would be “rational” is easy – such as a negotiation where both parties end up with positive outcomes – people still choose to do something emotional. Other members pointed out that rationality encompasses an individual’s own value function – tangible things like money, but also emotional values such as feeling respected (someone may reject a negotiation even if it will result in lots of money if they don’t feel respected, and that may not necessarily be irrational).
Emotion and rationality are deeply intertwined and not distinct.
Memory is the main factor that informs decision-making, and emotions are pivotal to memories.
We oftentimes remember how certain experiences made us feel, instead of the tangible outcome they created.
Because we have memory, and memory informs decisions, we can’t make purely logical decisions and therefore rationality and emotions go hand-in-hand.
Rationality is a purely logical, non-emotional decision.
The only way to evaluate a decision as rational is to take the context out of it – to remove the individual value functions that may be at play and look at the scenario more objectively. Under this view, rationality and emotion are opposing.
Emotions are fleeting - what someone may feel in one moment may not be what they feel in the next moment, which is why a rational decision is meant to extract these complexities and help people make more effective decisions.
One member agreed with this definition of rationality, but stated that it was irrelevant because it’s not possible for people to fully abstract out their emotions.
How can we blend the right amount of logic and emotion to make more effective decisions?
As a precursor to being able to “hack” the right balance of logic and emotion, someone needs to be in tune with themselves and truly understand what their own value function is.
Oftentimes, people can rationalize decisions in retrospect. Projecting what one’s value function is in the present moment onto a past experience may not mean that the decision made in the past was actually rational.
Practice regret minimization - “do I think that this is something my future self would regret?”
By practicing regret minimization, we can try to project our value function into the future and determine what choice, regardless of outcome, will be the best.
We’re not always trying to pick the perfect decision, but the one that when looking back on our choices, we felt was worth the choice so that we would never have the question of “what if?”.
At a certain level, the result of this framework is to separate the outcome from the choice.
It depends on many factors: whether or not there is time to make the decision, whether or not the decision is easily reversible, etc.
For decisions that need to be made in a split second, it’s not possible to use reason to make the decision and we have to rely on our gut primarily.
For decisions that we have time to make, we can use several frameworks: regret minimization, risk tolerance checks, and more to make an informed decision by weighing the pros and cons of each choice.
For decisions that are not easily reversible (i.e. life changing choices like having children or immigrating to a new country), people mentioned that using logic in these decisions is extremely difficult due to the gravity of the outcome. Acting primarily on emotions in these circumstances might make more sense.
One idea that was expressed was that it’s more important to teach ourselves to handle any outcome, instead of harping too much on the choices. Although we can try to optimize our decision making process for ourselves and leverage frameworks and other tools to try to make the right decisions all the time, the most useful thing may be to learn to be OK with any outcome, making decision-making relatively inconsequential. If decisions are really hard to make, just flip a coin and know that we will be able to handle whatever comes.
Closing thoughts
Throughout the discussion, there were two central topics we discussed: rationality and emotionality in the objective, and rationality and emotionality in the process of being objective. Sometimes, rationality or emotionality may become the objective itself (and not be a factor in the decision) – such is the case with the negotiation example where people choose to harm themselves for the purpose of “winning” the negotiation, and thus emotionality becomes the objective. Other times, we try to balance rationality and emotion to achieve our objective, by formulating some kind of framework or process to make the right decision, where the right decision is up to our own value function. Regardless of how we balance rationality and emotion, it is imperative that we work towards resilience under any circumstances.
Let us know what you think about:
“Safe Haven” by Mark Spitznagel
“Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland
“The Righteous Mind” by Jonathon Haidt
How do you balance logic and emotion in your own life?
Do you have frameworks for making decisions?
How do you manage negative outcomes from logical or emotional decisions?
Do you think emotionality and rationality are intertwined, opposites, or somewhere in between?