How feelings contaminate thinking

Emotional contagion is a much bigger problem than incorrect information online

Note: the following describes noticing how things are for me. I'm not an expert on you or 'people' in general. It was inspired by the bullet through Trump's ear and how crazy it sent people.

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It’s easy to confuse your feelings with your thoughts

Among the handiest personal insights, during the depths of my onetime addiction to being shouty on Twitter, was that emotional arousal made me stupid.

It should be obvious, right? But that's not how it works. The moment you're having feelings is exactly the moment when it might be best to suspend thinking at all, because the thoughts won't be reliable until the feelings have passed.

The thoughts will be in service to your feelings, rather than any kind of actual epistemic state in external reality.

This is because the feelings make you think in ways that will justify the feelings.

You see this in a lot of scholarly arguments in the humanities as well as in general political chatter.

People feel bad about something and all their thinking is in the service of justifying that they feel bad. Feelings that arise from empathy are especially bad for this.

Emotions are weird like that. It's as if they can't just sit there, merely being ambiently feely, while you crack on with thinking dispassionately about whatever it is that provoked them. They have a tendency to dictate how and often even what you'll be thinking.

Amateur speculation: this is really what makes us flatten everything, no matter how complex, into basic heuristics.

Most of the recognised authorities in this kind of cognitive study field suggest that heuristics are a 'labour-saving' device to avoid the cerebral heavy lifting of sifting and weighing competing interpretations of nuanced subjects.

But the sense I have is that heuristics are mainly useful for justifying how we already feel about things.

They serve the purpose of reassuring us that our feelings are the correct ones to have. In this way they are tools for ego-protection as well as reducing cognitive effort. Ego-protection because obviously it's important that your feelings are the right ones, under the circumstances.

Everyone knows, at least in an abstract sense, that feelings are often unreliable as a guide to reality. But because we typically identify with them rather than merely experience or notice them it becomes imperative to justify the feelings in order to retain a sense of validity. It's ego again.

Dull personal experience has been a good teacher.

I was once addicted to sadness, rather than being the happy clappy chappie you're subscribed to and sometimes might even read. I wallowed in feeling wan and mellow. It was a comfortable cocoon.

It was exactly the same with the all-consuming anger and contempt I fed on when most immersed in political chatter. Those feelings reinforced an illusion of myself as more perceptive, intelligent and morally just in my perspectives than most other people. I was someone with the right values.

None of this would matter if it weren't for the fact that emotion is contagious.

We know this already; that some people have a knack of filling space with their vibe and how it sticks to you. I grew up in a house like that, where the moment you stepped in it was  palpable that something was 'in the air', even before you even saw anyone.

Back then, chez moi, it was known as 'an atmosphere'.

It used to be that this was about the only time we were ever influenced by the unspoken feelings of others.

This seems to have changed, so that many of us are constantly aware of many more people having feelings, than the those in our immediate orbit.

Internet + feelings = a force multiplier for unhelpful emotion

It's easy to see the two big changes that created this vibe. One was cultural and the other technological. They are both often identified, but rarely talked of as a combination.

The cultural shift was from hiding feelings to celebrating them. Even fetishising them. Like many cultural shifts it was a swing from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The technological shift was the digital networking of people who were hitherto unaware of each other’s existence. Which was probably for the best.

Whatever the original social visions of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey et al, what we ended up with was  pandemonium.

Internet + feelings = a constant state of emotional arousal when plugged in to the bedlam of people having feelings about things.

And emotional arousal = unclear thinking.

This isn't a call to stop feeling. Feelings aren't the problem.

They're like your domestic water supply. It’s necessary for health and lovely to have. As long as it's contained and released only where needed, when you need it.

As I tend to feel less (this is a sidebar discussion for another time, to do with meditative states and the thoughts of a certain Chinese philosopher from long ago) I notice the burden of feelings in certain others differently.

There is someone who became quite prolific on Substack Notes who is consistently in a state of emotional arousal. I unfollowed and muted them in the aftermath of that Trump bullet-dodge because their feelings were compromising their usual output of high quality thoughts.

It's one tiny example from billions happening every day. And a useful one.

What happened was this.

In the moments before it was known that Donald Trump had been injured in a shooting, CNN instantly reported that he was bundled off an election rally stage after falling.

Sometime later, the person in question posted a screenshot of that headline and announced that this headline justified their 'contempt for journalists'.

It's a perfect example of flattening into a simplistic heuristic inspired by emotional arousal.

Although CNN skews blatantly liberal-leftish, it's stupid to believe that CNN was exercising an editorial decision to pretend that Trump had not been shot. So the claim that the headline justified contempt for journalists was stupid too.

This person is extremely intelligent and often demonstrates the kind of analytical skills that I would emulate, if I were as gifted as them. So they provide an interesting example of how emotion clouds a good brain.

What they missed was a prosaic truth that incentives to instantly publish hyper-granular news 'as it happens' necessarily entails publishing misleading information.

It was just a headline borne of a terrible business model. It wasn't biased reporting.

But this person has feelings about some people who obviously aren’t on their side and the feelings hijacked their capacity to think. A business model and its incentives were overlooked, because emotion got in the way.

As well as making you wrong, those kind of feelings make you unhappy

There's a tendency to give various cognitive failings like this fancy names and you can easily find impressive-seeming lists of them which provide the illusion of explanatory depth (see what I did there).

Of course, like many things in the broad field of psychology, many of them haven't replicated, but remain popular in online discourse as weapons for trying to win arguments by dunking on opponents. My personal favourite is the 'backfire effect', which turned out to be nonsense.

But here's my personal amateur theory; it's all just downstream of ego anyway.

Something I notice when I feel a generalised sense of wellbeing (defined as a state in which I wish for zero alteration of the current circumstances) is that I'm less argumentative.

Someone says something that really does't jibe with my sense of things and I'll either experience an internal unpleasant sense of arousal or it will just float past me. It just depends on my mood.

A friend sits on my sunny terrasse, plays his latest musical composition and suggests that Covid isn't real and that the vaccines weren't tested and I'm aware that these are just thoughts in his head that have no valence outside of those synapses and whatever other constructs are managing the information flow in his wetware.

He's a great guy and I enjoy his company. He thinks things about Bill Gates that I've read about and which seem ludicrous and none of it matters. These are just thoughts in his head and some noises coming out of his face. He's still a great guy. We move on to how his new tune could be arranged and everything is fine.

But get me in a low energy moment and I'm instantly moved to argue. To prove him mistaken. My ego wants this. The rest of me couldn't give a fuck.

My ego wants to elevate me above him.

That, it seems to me, is the clue to why people argue so much. Why being 'right' matters in such a personal way.

The need to prevail over another is linked with a need to feel elevated. From one state to another.

An undesirable state to a more desirable one.

People mostly argue because they're unhappy. That's my theory.

It's not because 'the truth' is important to establish and mutually acknowledge, which is the story that's usually told about this.

I only want to dispute things that don't actually matter one jot when I'm feeling uneasy in my momentary circumstances. And when I'm feeling contented I couldn't care less.

This seems to be why (speaking strictly for me - again, you might be totally different) the more mindful I become, the less egotistical I feel.

The less egotistical I feel, the more accepting I am.

The more accepting I am, the better I can see the best in others and just allow them the thoughts that don't jibe with my own.

Kumbaya. But honestly, seriously, it's great and I recommend it.

Ego is bad news, for me at least, because I enjoy feeling curious about things more than I enjoy feeling settled that I'm right about them.

Trump is a perfect example. I'm as fascinated by those who can't see his gifts as I am about how awful he seems to me. He is the emotion-arousing brain-jacker-in-chief. If anyone benefits from frequently irrational feelings - especially love and hate - it's him.

The number of intelligent people I've heard suggesting that it would have been preferable had the assassin blown his head apart on TV proves this. Preferring an obviously catastrophic event, leading to who knows what, just because they have feelings about him, is as good as it gets as a warning against emotion when thinking is better.

Even I was surprised by my non-reaction to Trump getting shot

When the Trump bullet dodge exploded into the news I knew something had changed personally, because all I felt was curiosity and fascination for what was suddenly unfolding.

It was like mythic fiction suddenly being projected into the ether and I had a sense of watching it as if I'd seen it happen before. It was almost a dissociative state.

That epic image. A fat old blond man, with blood on the side of his head, pumping his fist in front of a flag while protectors huddle around him. It wasn’t merely a news image. It was something else that just oozed out of the primeval slime of America's political gunk.

I was instantly transported back to the 2nd plane hitting the twin towers when you knew that something big was lodged inside you forever, whether or not you understood what it actually meant. It was more like art than anything else. Really kitsch and obvious art that leaves nothing to discuss or ponder.

Bloodied Trump with his fist raised was something poking through from another dimension. It made instant sense of something I can't name and won’t even try to. And what struck me was how I wasn’t surprised. It was like a film where you know mad things are bound to happen and it's fine because it's just some images and sounds.

But I knew other people would start having feelings about it, which meant lots of noise would erupt.

My personal reaction was to ignore almost everything that was instantly pouring into my Substack feed. I knew that none of what was about to be emoted would matter in another fortnight, let alone stand up to future analysis.

But I was glad to read this piece. Paul Kingsnorth wrote the only thing I needed to read.

All the World is Myth

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How I learned this week that my aesthetic perceptions perpetuate slave-trading culture

Part of the journey away from culturally leftishist ideology in particular has been a developing mistrust of language per se.

The problem with language - specifically of the discursive kind - is that it can be used to persuade people of anything, regardless of any 'truth value'. All it needs is a bit of rhetorical oomph et voilà, it will get repeated by people who like it for whatever reason.

In this piece I summed up my scepticism:

"You can argue anything with sufficiently sophisticated language and a significant subset of people will be persuaded. Most of the anti-this-or-that isms work like this. The ones designed to persuade us that some things are inherently unjust but fixable by engineering human nature out of people. Because everything is a social construct."

Then, this week, there was this.

He is obviously so tired, y’all

In the thread, Dr Olusoga's argument is that black athletes are described, in Olympic commentary, using different adjectives to those used when observing white ones.

For example, black gymnasts are more likely to be described as 'strong' and 'powerful', whereas white ones get called things like 'elegant' or 'graceful'.

Intuitively I am not inclined to dispute that this really happens.

It seems obvious and ordinary that different specifications of human result in different ways of seeing - and therefore describing - them. And, because I'm not a moron, I can appreciate how this might not always be good or nice. It’s always going to depend.

But, inevitably, these ways of referring to brilliant athletes are considered by Dr Olusoga to be unjust and he suggests that 'we can do better'; that this is outright bias and - of course - research proves it.

It is, apparently, the language of racism and slavery.

Now, I can only talk about me, but I think that black athletes tend to look more aesthetically pleasing to my eye than white ones. Either sex. Rather like the way I think that old black people look 'better' (in aesthetic terms) than old white people. And part of that is that they look (to me) more vigorous or less decrepit in general.

As a straight man, if I were forced somehow (at proverbial gunpoint, say) to be physically intimate with a man, I would prefer it to be with a black man. It's an innate reaction. An 'unconscious bias' in favour of the aesthetics of blackness, if you will

Now I have learned, thanks to Dr Olusoga, that I am appraising these people in the same way as those who bought slaves.

It's a perfect gotcha move and part of the purpose behind this kind of rhetoric is that you are meant to mount a rational argument against it.

But it is pushing back that gives credibility to rhetorical declamations when it seems to me that they are merely worth noting at best - or ignoring altogether.

Dr Olusoga wants me to do better. It is duly noted. Yes, I've thought about it. Interesting suggestion, thanks.

I remain confident that I don't have slave-trading inclinations. Same as I do that my friend who enjoys the dark skin of his Kenyan lover, about which I have heard him wax lyrical, doesn't either.

Part of me always wants to rail against this kind of theorising. A tiny part of me is triggered by being smeared by it. But in the end it's just some words. It's just my ego that objects. My thinking brain sees it differently. In a more bemused way.

Apparently we discount all the pain and determination invested by Simone Biles into her art if we think she is a beautiful force of nature or dare to suggest that there's also some 'raw talent' there. Because, you see, if you suggest that there is anything in her that is inherently that way ... because she is a black woman you are perpetuating a racist trope.

I grew up mocking the old they're very good at dancing thing, but this kind of leftishist cultural critique actually makes me less inclined to do so.

Show me the evidence that 'they' aren't, on average, perhaps better at some things (like dancing). Isn't this what you'd need to do, really, before calling it a racist trope?

My accountant is black. I have no idea whether he is a better dancer than me, because I don't think about that. I pay him to sort out my financials. But I have never been presented with any evidence against thinking that perhaps he is not only way better at figures than me but also might have superior inherent rhythm.

It only sounds stupid framed in that way because worrying about it actually is stupid.

The current Olympic Games have been the most culturally political I can remember, as the current hegemony advertises its raw power. There have even been warnings to camera operators not to frame women athletes differently to men. A friend told me their gay son was quite pissed off with the opening ceremony, describing it as ‘too much’.

Times have changed and progress has been made. You will now have your nose rubbed in ‘progress’, in case you hadn’t noticed.

All this used to annoy me more than it does now. But life goes on and the gap between words and the material world will always be there.

Bless 'em, I say. The well-intentioned theorists. They do at least help keep me honest. Even if its not in the way they would approve.

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Postscript:

Just for fun here's a theory of the inverse relationship between emotional investment and intelligence using a quasi-scientific approach. It looks quite impressive and would probably convince some people that it’s an actual thing, if it were published in the right places. ChatGPT helped with this.

[Emotional arousal∝1Epistemic sophistication

[Emotional arousal∝1Epistemic sophistication

This formula suggests that our emotional arousal in relation to a situation is in inverse proportion to our epistemic sophistication, leading to confidence increasing in line with feelings about the subject, rather than actual facts or analysis.

1. **∝:** This symbol represents "proportional to." It indicates that there is a proportional relationship between the two sides of the equation. In this context, it means that as one variable changes, the other changes in a proportional manner.

2. **\(\text{Emotional arousal}:** This variable represents the degree of emotional arousal or feelings one has about a particular issue or topic.

3. **1Epistemic sophistication:** This part of the formula involves a fraction. The numerator is 1, indicating a constant, and the denominator is Epistemic sophistication, which represents how sophisticated our understanding of a given issue is. The higher our level of emotional arousal, the more simplistic our understanding of the issue becomes.