Do Emotions Help or Hinder Rational Thinking?

It’s not uncommon to hear that being “emotional” is the opposite of being “rational.” For many people, the idea of rationality evokes images of a person engaging in intelligent, calculated reasoning—ignoring the “illogical” influences of emotion. This suggests that there is no place for emotion in rational thinking. However, some recent work from our lab suggests the opposite.¹

We found that individuals who score higher on tests of intelligence and rationality don’t ignore emotions. Instead, they pay more attention to emotions, are better at recognizing and understanding emotions, and are better at using emotional information when making decisions.

While this might seem surprising at first, it makes more sense when you think about it a bit. In fact, it’d actually be quite odd if it were helpful to ignore emotions. This is because most intelligent decision-making requires emotional information. Emotions tell us what we want and what we don’t want, and we can’t make smart decisions without first knowing what our goals are.

For example, if I want to make my child happy, and I know they like video games, it would make sense for me to buy them a video game. But, if I instead want them to stay focused on homework and I believe a video game would distract them too much, then it wouldn’t make sense for me to buy them the video game. You can see from this example that a rational decision can’t be made unless I know multiple pieces of emotional information.

First, I needed to know what I wanted (i.e., what I expected would make me happy). Second, I needed to know how different decisions would change my child’s emotions (i.e., if the video game would make them happy and if it would make them distracted). So, it’s hard to see how rational decisions could even work without emotions.

Anticipating others’ emotions may help us be more effective leaders—allowing us to predict the way people will respond to what we say or do. Anticipating our own emotions can also make for much more effective long-term decisions. For example, if I predict I will feel anxious before giving a public speech, I might be motivated to practice a few more times. If I instead simply suppressed or ignored my anxiety, chances are I’d be more distracted on stage, and my speech wouldn’t go as smoothly.

It also turns out that chronically ignoring and suppressing emotions can amplify physical health problems by increasing blood pressure and inflammation.^{2; 3; 4} In contrast, if you pay attention to your feelings and try to understand what’s causing them, you can often identify effective ways for keeping them at healthy levels and promoting your physical health at the same time. So, in the example above, anxiety motivated the “rational” choice to practice and give a better speech, which was the goal. It also helped maintain physical health.

There are many other examples where emotions can be helpful in serving our goals. For example, expressions of sadness often help us gain social support when we’ve experienced a loss, fear can help us detect and avoid legitimate dangers, and anger can motivate us to defend ourselves when others are disrespectful or are trying to prevent us from reaching our goals.

Of course, it’s important to identify situations where these emotional influences may not be helpful as well. Here, individuals who score higher on rationality tests may be better at reflecting on whether an emotion will be helpful or not in a given situation. They can then make their decision after giving it more thorough consideration. For example, expressing too much anger or sadness to your boss when you don’t get a promotion may not be in your best interest. But these emotions could motivate you to work harder toward getting the promotion next time.

With these ideas in mind, consider the specific findings of our recent study mentioned above.¹ This study used measures of cognitive skills associated with intelligence and rationality, and emotional skills, such as emotion recognition, emotional awareness, and the ability to effectively respond to (and modify) one’s own emotions and those of others (sometimes called “emotion regulation” or “emotion management”).

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Intelligence or IQ tests are well-known. These measure aspects of a person’s cognitive abilities, such as how good they are at spotting complex patterns or understanding abstract concepts. The key thing here is that IQ tests measure differences in how well people can perform when they are putting forth mental effort to do so. But some people with high IQ scores still make bad decisions. This is because they may not regularly put forth the mental effort to use their reasoning skills, even if they have them.

Rationality tests are different. They measure how often people actually do put forth mental effort when making choices; in other words, how often people stop and think through a problem before jumping to conclusions and making biased, unhelpful decisions.

Some rationality measures simply ask people to indicate how much they agree with statements such as: “I like to gather many different types of evidence before I decide what to do.” Other rationality tests ask people to solve specific word problems. For example, say I told you that a woman named Jane is politically liberal and an outspoken activist for human rights.

Then I asked you which is more probable: 1) Jane is a lawyer, or 2) Jane is a lawyer and a feminist. Previous work using similar questions has shown that many people are tempted to say the second answer is more probable since Jane sounds like she would be a feminist.⁵ But this is actually the wrong answer.

If you stop and think it through—that is, if you act “rationally”—you realize that the probability that a person is one thing by itself (a lawyer) is always greater than or equal to the probability that they are one thing and another thing at the same time (being a lawyer and a feminist). If only some lawyers are feminists, then fewer people are both, and the probability must be less—, and if all lawyers were feminists, the probability of being both would be the same as the probability of only being a lawyer.

What we found in our study is that people who get these sorts of questions right also tend to have better emotional skills. They get more correct answers on tests of recognizing emotions in faces, and they are better at understanding and describing their own emotions. They also score better on multiple-choice tests that ask what types of responses are most likely to help a person feel better in difficult situations.

So, what does this mean for how we should think about rationality? Or for how we should think about emotions? One main takeaway is that if you want to be rational and make the best choices, you should not ignore your emotions. Instead, you should pay attention to your emotions and those of others, try to understand what they are and what’s causing them, and then use this knowledge to make more informed decisions. Ignoring emotions just means you have less information and that you’ll often be worse at choosing the most effective actions as a result.

Ignoring emotions also means you won’t be able to anticipate how others will respond to your decisions or be able to prepare for your own emotional responses in future scenarios—both of which could have major consequences for interactions with co-workers and for maintaining relationships.

Another takeaway is how this relates to physical and mental health. As mentioned above, suppressing emotions on a regular basis can make you more vulnerable to various physical health problems, especially in relation to cardiovascular and immune function. Most evidence-based psychotherapies—such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)—also teach people not to suppress emotions. Instead, they help people learn to pay attention to their emotions, understand them, and respond to them in more effective ways.

In general, if we want to be rational and make the best decisions, we should desire as much information as we can get—and information about emotions (both our own and those of others) can often be especially useful.