I began my research into happiness – and emotions in general, the ways we use them in our culture – not long before Trump was elected. Since then, I’ve been paying attention to the decisions I make based on what I want to feel. And as it turns out, I make a lot more of them than I thought that way.
Most other people seem to do it, too.
When you watch a comedy or read a romance, it’s pretty clear that you’re choosing what to feel from a marketplace of emotions. We choose a lot of other leisure activities – including things like fishing and watching football – because of the particular emotions the particular emotions we expect to experience.
At the same time, we live in a society that still places Enlightenment values on a high pedestal. We don’t always use those values, and they don’t always match up with the way the world works, but we value them anyway. Back during the Enlightenment (the 17th and 18th centuries, give-or-take), a lot of the philosophers who ended up shaping American thought for the long run believed that people were fundamentally rational creatures. Your emotions were in there, but the best men were the ones who knew how to keep their emotions in their place. And women were seen as having a problem in part because it was thought that they couldn’t. (As it turns out, no one really does, of course.)
God gave us emotions to provide data points to help us make rational decisions. Not the other way around. Emotions shouldn’t influence your reasoning, Enlightenment thinkers figured.
That would be bad.
Reason and Rationalization
With some minor modification, we’ve carried this idea through to the present. There are certain parts of life where it seems natural to assume that emotions would take a back seat to rational thought.
It may seem natural – but that doesn’t mean we actually do things that way.
Along the line we came up with the word “rationalization.” We had done it before, but now we have a word for it. As Ben Franklin famously wrote:
“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”
We are every bit as “reasonable” today as Franklin. The range of sources for news (or maybe I should say “news“ in some cases) has broadened. There is a growing marketplace in which people can decide not just what they want to learn, but how they want to feel. There is now a de facto marketplace of emotions in the news business.
Some outlets keep the emotional temperature low, aiming for a patina of objectivity. Some play off curiosity and irony. Some aim straight for negative emotions – giving a place to validate them, but also an echo chamber to create them.
At the same time, even outlets that claim to be serious, rational purveyors of news have taken to reporting on the theatrics of the debates instead of the substance, and focusing, often without context, on the Twitter-performances Trump offers up.
Your Choice of Emotions
So here we get to today’s study, from a team lead by Amit Goldberg. You can find the original in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, but here’s an accessible, non-fire-walled explanation.
It shows, basically, that people have some ability to select their emotions in social situations. If you’re around angry people but don’t want to become angry yourself, you’ll probably stay calm. But if you’re open to being angry, they can act as an accelerant.
So what do you want to feel?
If someone asked, you might opt for “calm” – that’s a pretty typical notion in our society. We often talk, after all, as though it were still the Enlightenment.
At the same time, calmness can be a bit dull. We often opt to be piqued. A little bit of anger (if it’s aimed at people you don’t know) or something to explain the fear you seem to feel – there’s pleasure in these.
I’m certainly not going to say that people shouldn’t participate in the marketplace of emotions. It is, after all, one of the things that makes being human fun.
But it’s good to pay attention when you’re doing it – when you’re shopping for feelings rather than news.