Are we rational or emotional beings?

What weighs more in human beings, their analytical and logical facet or their emotions?

If we were asked to summarize in one adjective something that defines human beings and differentiates them from other animals, we would probably refer to the fact that ours is a rational species.

Unlike the vast majority of life forms, we can think in abstract terms related to language, and thanks to them we are able to create long-term plans, be aware of realities that we have never experienced firsthand, and speculate about how nature works, among many other things.

However, it is also true that emotions play an important role in the way we experience things; mood influences the decisions we make, how we prioritize, and even how we remember. Which of these two areas of our mental life best defines us?

Are we rational or emotional animals?

What differentiates rationality from emotionality? This simple question could be a subject on which entire books could be written, but something that quickly catches our attention is that rationality is usually defined in more concrete terms: rational is the action or thought that is based on reason, which is the area in which the compatibilities and incompatibilities that exist between ideas and concepts are examined on the basis of principles of logic.

That is to say, what characterizes rationality is the consistency and solidity of the actions and thoughts that emanate from it. Therefore, the theory says that something rational can be understood by many people, because the coherence of this set of ideas fitted together is information that can be communicated, since it does not depend on the subjective.

On the other hand, the emotional is something that cannot be expressed in logical terms, and therefore remains "locked" in the subjectivity of each one. subjectivity. Art forms can be a way of publicly expressing the nature of the emotions that are felt, but neither the interpretation that each person makes of these artistic works nor the emotions that this experience will evoke are equal to the subjective experiences that the author has wanted to capture.

In short, the fact in itself that the rational is easier to define than the emotional tells us about one of the differences between these two realms: the former works very well on paper and allows us to give expression to certain mental processes by making others understand them in an almost exact way, while emotions are private, they cannot be reproduced in writing.

However, the fact that the realm of the rational can be described more accurately than that of the emotional does not mean that it better defines the way we behave. In fact, in some ways the opposite is true.

Bounded rationality: Kahneman, Gigerenzer...

Because the emotional is so difficult to define, many psychologists prefer to speak, in any case, of "bounded rationality".. What we would usually call "emotions" would thus be buried in a bunch of tendencies and behavioral patterns that, this time, have relatively easy to describe limits: they are everything that is not rational.

Thus, researchers such as Daniel Kahneman or Gerd Gigerenzer have become famous for conducting numerous investigations in which it is shown to what extent rationality is an entelechy and does not represent the way in which we usually act. Kahneman, in fact, has written one of the most influential books on the subject of bounded rationality: Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, in which he conceptualizes our way of thinking by distinguishing a rational and logical system from an automatic, emotional and fast one.

Heuristics and cognitive biases

Heuristics, cognitive biases, all the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions in the shortest possible time and with the limited amount of resources and information we have.... all of these, mixed with emotions, are part of non-rationalitybecause they are not procedures that can be explained through logic.

However, when it comes down to it, it is non-rationality that is most present in our lives, as individuals and as a species. And, moreover, many of the clues about the extent to which this is so are very easy to see..

Rational is the exception: the case of advertising

The existence of advertising gives us a clue to that. Thirty-second TV spots in which the explanations about the technical characteristics of a car are null and void and we cannot even see what the vehicle looks like can make us want to buy it, investing several salaries in it.

The same is true of all advertising in general; advertising pieces are ways of making something sell without having to communicate in detail the technical (and therefore objective) characteristics of the product. Companies spend too many millions annually on advertising for this communication mechanism not to tell us something about how buyers make decisions, and behavioral economics has been generating a lot of research that shows how decision making based on intuition and stereotypes is very common, practically the default buying strategy.The behavioral economics of communication does not tell us anything about how shoppers make decisions.

Challenging Jean Piaget

Another way to see the extent to which rationality is bounded is to realize that logic and most notions of mathematics must be learned deliberately, investing time and effort into it. Although it is true that newborns are already capable of thinking in basic mathematical terms, a person can live his whole life without knowing what logical fallacies are and constantly falling into them.

It is also known that in certain cultures adults remain in the third stage of cognitive development as defined by Jean Piaget, instead of moving on to the fourth and final stage, characterized by the correct use of logic. In other words, logical and rational thinking, rather than being an essential characteristic of human beings, is rather a historical product present in some cultures and not in others.

Personally, I believe that the latter is the definitive argument as to why that parcel of mental life that we can associate with rationality cannot be compared to the realms of emotions, hunches and cognitive bungling that we tend to do on a daily basis to get out of complex contexts that in theory should be addressed through logic. If we have to offer an essentialist definition of what defines the human mind, then rationality as a way of thinking and acting has to be left out, because it it is the result of a cultural milestone arrived at through the development of language and writing..

Emotion predominates

The trap by which we may come to believe that we are rational beings "by nature" is probably that, compared to the rest of life, we are far more logical and prone to systematic reasoning.This does not mean, however, that we think fundamentally on the basis of the principles of logic; historically, the cases in which we have done so are exceptions.

The use of reason may have very spectacular results and it may be very useful and advisable to make use of it, but that does not mean that reason itself is not, in itself, something to aspire to, rather than something that defines our mental life. If logic is so easy to delimit and define, it is precisely because it exists more on paper than in ourselves..