Emotions Often Win Over Reason, Feeling-Good Can Matter More than Facts

in #philosophy6 years ago (edited)

Facts don't always win people over to reality or truth. Emotions have a large say in what is accepted. How we feel about information influences us. Many of us are only moved by appeals to emotion to pull, tug, move and push us into accepting something, or into certain actions. The truth and reality of the issue doesn't matter as much as how we feel about it, or how it makes us feel.


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There is also the backfire effect, whereby people reject new information, no matter how much there is, and dig their heels in deeper with a falsity, because they want what they believe to be true. The truth in reality doesn't really matter to them as much as what they want, desire or wish to be true. Emotions and desires rule over seeing what really 'is' there.

Antonio Damasio discovered that people who had damage to the emotional parts of the brain, had the common issue of having great difficulty making decisions. Emotions are important to decide and choose one thing over another. We value, weigh and judge things based on how we feel much of the time.

Logic, unfortunately, is not a high level concern for a basic human who doesn't know themselves and these cognitive biases and deficits. Truth matters less than having our emotional desires, wants and wishes satiated through following how we feel about things. A decision is not based on wanting truth, right, good or morality to prevail as an outcome, but on wanting to do something personally based on how they feel.

Some people don't want to be convinced with reason, because they can't be. A negotiation with reality must take place for them to change their worldview or selfview. Getting people to an emotional position that gets them to trust you, is a way to influence and manipulate others into accepting something, true or false.

If you get people to admit their problems, their pain, their suffering, and their vulnerability, then they are emotionally open, and you can build on that vision of their problem to propose a solution that fits with what they want and how they feel about something. It might not be the best solution, because they don't care about what is best, optimal or more right or less wrong. They just want what they want, the full, honest, hard truth be damned, they want to feel good about themselves and get what they want.

About the Antonia Damasio article, someone made a comment about it on Facebook once:

"Research suggests that logical arguments and facts are not what drives change. What really matters is how we make others feel."

Then I said:

"What do you mean by: 'What really matters is how we make others feel'?"

They responded:

"I think this means we need to make our best efforts to appeal more to the heart than the head. So what we say to them matters less than how they feel about us, and whether they regard us as worthy of their trust. It points to the importance of caring and connecting with those we talk with, and listening closely to learn how we can best serve their interests and emotional needs."

Rather than serve truth, reality, existence, no, let's serve our egos, emotions and false perceptions that have us attached to lower consciousness interests and the emotional attachment towards those things in our lives we don't want to let go of. That doesn't cut it for me.

This is what I have to say about the "feel-good" self-focus people try to validate as the best way to speak the watered down "truth" to people.


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It's not about how YOU make them feel, that's just one way to manipulate them to change. What determines whether they change to accept something or reject it, is based on how THEY feel about the change itself. You just act to influence them to "feel-good" about something for them to accept it.

The article is not really saying "what really matters is how we make others feel." That's just one way of manipulating them into a love-bomb "feel-good" emotional state to accept something from you that you want them to accept by relating to you as the "feel-good" producer. They will trust you because you make them feel-good, and then more likely trust and accept the message you deliver, even if it's false. Emotions can manipulate and deceive.

This is how many beliefs are propagated into consciousness, especially religious personalities, New Age gurus and the like, who peddle fantasies. But those fantasies give us a story that make us "feel-good". If the messenger can make you feel-good about a message, then you are likely to accept the message.

One way to get people to accept something is by targeting their emotional, feeling, desire, wants saliency, value, importance or weighing capacity. By knowing what someone desires can, you an manipulate them to accept or do things.

The punchline is that logic and reasoning of facts in reality doesn't often work, because people are more concerned about their self-interested self-concerned self-centered gains and advantage that they will get or lose. How they feel about something is the point, not really how you make them feel.

The feeling of a topic, what "feels right" (whether it is right or not), what "feels good" (whether it is good or not), is related to the saliency (impact, importance, weight) of the information as it relates to them personally. The saliency of information is how you feel about it, what you desire from it, if your desires align with the information, if you weigh the information as important to you personally, if you value the information. Saliency is related to feeling how valuable, important and weighted something is for you. And yes, if you can affect/alter someones feelings about something, then you can affect/alter whether they accept it or not.

Therefore, facts in reality, a truth, doesn't matter for many compared to how they feel about that something. Whether it is true or false, they will be more likely to accept it or reject it based on the saliency of the information to them, how they feel, the value they place in it, the important and weight it has for them in their lives.

This demonstrates the subjective attachment to self and how we want to feel-good about ourselves, vs. objective detachment to recognize the truth in reality that may not feel-good. People are focused on feel-good deceptions that will sustain and maintain their current condition, their current selfview or worldview, or what will improve their current condition, selfview or worldview, as judged/weighed from a feel-good self-interested self-concerned advantageous winning perspective of the saliency/importance/value of something as it relates to them.

There are many manipulators who know how to be charismatic, smooth talk and make you feel-good with word-magic and the science of imagery to invoke feel-good states in you related to them and their message they want you to accept. Once accepted, your behavior can change in accordance with the newly accepted information. This is how politics and sophistry work. This is how people have been manipulated for centuries or millennia.


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People need to focus on understanding truth, right, good and morality, and see the value/importance/weight and salient significance that those higher guiding principles will bring them and others in life. Then you don't need to make people "feel-good" about something for them to accept it, all you need to do is speak the truth.

Focusing on getting them to trust you by making them feel-good about you is a low consciousness approach of letting them to remain in this modality of consciousness whereby they always focus on their feel-good attachments, self-interest, self-concern and self-consideration. Then you have to do this manipulation game to play on their emotional attachment every time you want them to change. That is not dealing with the root causal factor of their low consciousness modality of focusing on themselves instead of truth, right, good and morality. Emotions matter, but they can get in the way of reasoning about what's really going on.

The root causal factor is their rejection of facts, reality, truth, right, good and morality in the first place, because they focus on themselves and feeling-good. The solution at the root causal level is to get them to actually care for truth, right, good and morality more, so that they can change themselves, rather than you making them feel-good for each issue. If people cared more about truth and facts than their subjective attachments and emotions, then we could change and get somewhere in a short period of time.

Caring about truth, right, good and morality is to have salience, value, importance and weight put on those higher guiding principles, rather than the lower self-interest, self-concern and self-consideration of personal advantage and feeling-good about a worldview, selfview or sensory stimulus.

The proper way to make decisions is based on a properly functioning consciousness and brain that provides both reasoning and rationality along with emotion and intuition to judge and value information objectively with respect to reality.


Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.


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It’s very hard in the moment to stop and to tell yourself that feelings pass, just like the weather, but that’s often exactly what we need to do!

So true, i think i see this happening everyday in my daily interactions. The boss wants to have a team that backs his idea. Managers often soften their tone and words to offer critique in a diplomatic way. Deceit and lies are used to win business from clients. Even if i walk into a store, and try on shoes or a suit, the store person will say those things look good on me, often to only book a sale. We often give out compliments in a social setting to feel accepted by the group. Often times, we are only following the herd, too afraid to call a spade, a spade. We also vote in elections emotionally.

I have also noticed that many a times, I have an inclination to believe people who are nice to me, confusing fact with what i feel emotionally about that person. And even people who are happy around me, trust me more. And then there are so many who do things that are harmful to their bodies, wrong in a moral sense, just because it makes them feel good. I think it is also linked to taking the easy way out during difficult times and conversations, as it is a way to avoid situations in which one feels bad.

You give a lot of good examples. Speaking nicely gets ppl to favor the message by default as opposed to having a negative tone. Making someone feel good about themselves is a way to get them to accept criticism and not reject it as well ;) We are controlled by our emotion affections without even realizing it ;)

Yes, absolutely, i think majority of our decision making is emotional. Some may say that is what makes us human, although i am not sure if that is a good or a bad thing. :)

If something made me get off the shitty "feels" over logic bandwagon was having to live here in Venezuela.

I was born in 95' and the socialist party came into power in 98', you could safely say that all my conscious life has been under the socialist/communism regime.

I grew up watching the economy of this country fall into pieces because of the forced wealth redistribution, that yes, gave the poor a better life, for a while, while there where resources to steal and pillage, everything was fine and excellent...

All of this was done to make voters feel good i.e giving free stuff to the people to buy votes.

Now the country is worthless than a trash can and everyone's leaving, including me in the next few months...

I lost the train of thought of where I wanted to go with this comment and ended up rambling, the core of what I wanted to say is that this whole life experience made me apply myself and i value logic over feels any day of the week and that this experience made me anti socialist/communist and every time i see left leaning politicians of other countries forcing their pc crap and trying to imitate this shithole, I just vomit and pray that they lose... I'm pretty sad for my friends that escaped this socialist hell and went to Mexico just to end up on the same crap...

That's why some clueless Americans love Bernie Sanders... free everything! wo0ho00... :/

“but facts don’t care about your feelings”

My wife is a fiercely logical person, and she's famous for getting into arguments where she presents facts and people just don't want to listen to them.

I've learned that you can't save the world by yourself. If something is important enough to argue, you've got to appeal to emotion first. For better or worse it's the only way. It's been especially true with my own family, which is extremely illogical. I've just got to make my own decisions and let them take them or leave them. My mother's in her 70s, for example. I'm not going to change the way she feels about most things.

It's funny. We've started catching up on the old Star Trek: Voyager series which we missed in the 90s. My wife keeps saying, "Why doesn't anyone listen to the Vulcan?"

I so know that feeling.
If your mother was 50 years younger I would ask her for a date ;)

LOL. Good ol Star Trek ;) TNG was lacking in Vulcan logic, which they replaced with an android robot logic instead. It was almost the same, but not quite.

I appeal to logic and reasoning, not emotion... oops :/

It is a long known truth that emotions are more important than facts when it comes to decisions

(This is also a famous a bane to the left, which after all has the ideological base that you have to inform people and then they will make the right decisions, which they mostly don't do. I always see the pattern "they haven't heard the facts! that is why they are stupid!" on this side.)

Probably the most famous persons to know that are Hitler and Goebbels.
Hitler always trained his speeches in front of a mirror, looking how to make the best gestures etc.

And if you look at Trump today: The farer away he is from facts, the more his fans seem to like him.

Indeed, decisions are made by valuations which are emotional, what they care about will influence decisions making because it's valued. And although facts matter if you value facts, if you don't and just go with whatever you "prefer" then facts don't really matter in how you make decisions.

Many folks would rather feel the short term effects of feeling good and the long-term effects of using reason and their brain. The addictive drug of feeling good and kicking the can down down the lane often is used rather than taking the hard necessary medicine of using the brain and thinking with reason. A common practice a Feeling Good yet being lazy about dealing with the true issues at hand. Thanks for sharing such a good article @krnel

Yup, we're so hardwired to want to feel good we avoid, deny and deflect the potential betterment of working through the hard thinking that can heal.

Yes, it seems that logic and fact resound as cold to most...heartless and devoid of soul; and so the philosopher toils alone, knowing that sophistry would convince more minds, but unable to compromise what they hold as true.

Yes, sophists are plenty, who use ppl's emotions to get them to accept a message, since the message is not always true, it's required to use emotional feel-good tactics to get it accepted. Thinking about the message as being true or not void of emotional affinity is less desired. It's like we don't care if something is false or not in truth, only so long as we want it to be true ;)

Feeling good all the time diminishes the effects of feeling good.

That aside, every salesman worth his salt already knows this. They basically say it among themselves, they don't sell products, they sell emotions.

Just look at todays car advertisements.
The only fact they state is the price, the rest is all beautiful landscape (for most cars) or grinning, happy people.

It's true, and it is true for many things. No matter how trashy or bad the product is, it is always sold in a way that shows how amazing your life would be with it.

Especially terrible when children see it and basically grow up with these kind of lies.

Ha, yeah, that's how to best sell ideas or products and get people to buy into them. That's why New Age and "spiritual" stuff is so attractive.

On the other hand, it is probably also why people like to cling to shitty jobs and lifestyles so much.

Yes, sometimes what we feel we tend to think that is true and other stuff are just lies but we have to understand one basic concept and that is there is great interjection of manipulation between good and bad and when manipulation enters then for sure it will play an role which can misguide us.

And there is an saying as What we can see sometimes never exists and what we cannot see it's not mandatory that it's not exist, so to find out reality we have to read all aspects otherwise blind beliefs can misguide us.

And there are many forces in this world which enters into the game of manipulation and they will manipulate people in a way that, where people fail to understand the acts of behind the scenes and they believe on the masks.

So, it's difficult to fight with emotions but we have to be careful towards everything because this world is covered with the game of manipulation and they can control everyone because they use the manipulative methods with the use of technology.

Thanks for sharing this post with us and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂

That's why it's important to think, and not just feel your way around.