reason, rationality, and emotion
Do yourself a favor this weekend and pick up a copy of Jon Elster’s Reason and Rationality – an elegant little book published by Princeton Press based on a lecture that Elster gave at the Colége de France in 2006. If you’re a fan of Elster, you know that he is one of the more sophisticated living theorists of rational thought and decision-making. This book summarizes his thinking about the relationship between reasons and rational thought. They are linked through, and sometimes confounded by, emotion or passion. Here are a few phrases from the beginning of the book:
The rational actor is one who acts for sufficient reasons. These reasons are the beliefs and desires in light of which the action appears to be appropriate…The idea of rationality is often but wrongly related to that of the actor’s private good or self-interest in the moralists’ sense. Anyone who is pursuing the common good can – and even ought to – do so in a rational manner…From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not…Although they are different, the two norms encounter a common obstacle, namely, the passions (2-4).
Elster quotes La Bruyere, “Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but its greatest triumph is to conquer a man’s own interest.” This is the central theme of the essay – passion is the ultimate arbiter of human behavior. People feel constrained to act with reason – to provide justifiable accounts of their behavior – and to act rationally – to show that they are using appropriate/optimal means – but at its core behavior is motivated by a hierarchy of emotions. These emotions inform belief and shape the preferences individuals pursue. Strong emotions can make some reasons suddenly more urgent than they might have been before (or than they would be from a historical perspective). Expressions of self-interest or altruism are often strategic attempts to shape a public’s understanding of how one came to make a decision, but their function is often to obcure the emotional component of that decision.
The book reinforced my belief that the study of emotion and decision-making is an understudied aspect of economic sociology. It’s not that we don’t care about emotion, but it’s a difficult aspect of market behavior to observe and analyze. Here’s my earlier post on what economic sociology might learn from social psychology.
