Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think

Economist Winter looks at the relationship between emotion and rationality in this study, and if the results do not fully answer the questions he raises, he still gives plentiful insights into the many factors that govern our choices. The book’s central thesis is that being emotional and being rational are not the diametrically opposed states people often assume them to be, and that, far from clouding judgment, instinctive feelings play an essential role in guiding it. Winter draws on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma to illustrate this point, applying a mathematical model to the apparently unsystematic process of decision making. Even anger, within this framework, is persuasively shown to have an instructive purpose. Winter struggles, however, to tie all of the examples covered to the central theme of emotion. In particular, an extended passage that examines and questions clichés about gender and sexuality (such as “Men, more than women, seek physically attractive mates” and “Homosexuality provides no evolutionary advantage”) wanders far afield from the emotion-reason dichotomy. But even if the book doesn’t completely fulfill its goal of collapsing the divide between feelings and reason, we can at least begin, with its help, to reason with our emotions through their inherent foundation of rationality. [em]Agent: Jim Levine, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Dec.) [/em]